Astronomy

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has found planets, long ago, orbiting a star. It was believed that one of these planets would be able to harbor life. Recently, this has been confirmed through the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory. The planet discovered is Earth-sized and is a reasonable distance away from its star. Elisa Quintana of the SETI Institute and NASA AMES Research Center says that even though the star is cooler than our Sun, the planet might contain liquid water. Steve Howell, a co-author in this paper says that no telescope has been able to see the planet. "However, what we can do is eliminate essentially all other possibilities so that the validity of these planets is really the only viable option."

Gemini Observatory

Because the host star is so small, the team decided to eliminate any suggestion of a

Keck Observatory

background star mimicking what Kepler saw. They obtained extremely high spatial resolution images from the Gemini Observatory and the W. M. Keck Observatory. With these two telescopes observing the region, they were able to rule out several items and finally concluded that what Kepler detected was truly a planet. Quintana says that "Without these complementary observations we wouldn't have been able to confirm this Earth-sized planet. The host star is called Kepler 186 and the Earth-sized planet called Kepler-186f.

Sources:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140417141946.htm
https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/images/gssnow.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/KeckTelescopes-hi.png