Earth-like planet discovered

nasa.gov

14 points·peterchane··4 comments

I can't downvote or report as of yet, but the title is both sensational and incorrect (no one knows what's to be announced until noon, read the links you post).

The first exoplanet orbiting another star like our sun was discovered in 1995. Exoplanets, especially small Earth-size worlds, belonged within the realm of science fiction just 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamed about for thousands of years -- another Earth.

Sounds pretty accurate to me.

For sufficiently vague definitions of Earth. For the definitions being used in most of these sensationalized stories we've already got 2 more we know about, Venus and Mars, and I'm pretty sure if Mercury was picked up in another solar system we'd hear it described as "Earth-like" too, given some of the stuff that has been described that way. The "Earth-like" idea has been debased to uselessness in press releases like this.

Unless they announce that spectroscopy has revealed a lot of O2 in an atmosphere, at this point I'm primed to be pretty underwhelmed.

(And to be clear, I am specifically complaining about the debasing of the term "Earth-like" for PR purposes. The science and discoveries are as incredible as ever, no matter what garbage PR terms are used to describe them in process releases.)

"on the cusp of finding" is a much weaker statement than the current title "Earth-like planet discovered".

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