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Astronomers have made some very interesting discoveries in space recently, each potentially bringing them one step closer to finding habitable exo-planets with signs of extra-terrestrial life-forms.

A study appearing this week in the journal Nature revealed findings extracted from the combined offerings of three NASA space telescopes: Hubble, Spitzer, and Kepler. Data from the telescopes showed clear skies and steamy water vapor on a gaseous planet outside our solar system.
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A newly discovered planet in a binary star system located 3,000 light-years from Earth is expanding astronomers’ notions of where Earth-like—and even potentially habitable—planets can form, and how to find them.

At twice the mass of Earth, the planet orbits one of the stars in the binary system at almost exactly the same distance from which Earth orbits the sun. However, because the planet’s host star is much dimmer than the sun, the planet is much colder than the Earth—a little colder, in fact, than Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

Four international research teams, led by professor Andrew Gould of The Ohio State University, published their discovery in the July 4 issue of the journal Science.
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With the help of a tiny fragment of zircon extracted from a remote rock outcrop in Australia, the picture of how our planet became habitable to life about 4.4 billion years ago is coming into sharper focus.

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, an international team of researchers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscience Professor John Valley reveals data that confirm the Earth’s crust first formed at least 4.4 billion years ago, just 160 million years after the formation of our solar system. The work shows, Valley says, that the time when our planet was a fiery ball covered in a magma ocean came earlier.
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Three more Earth-like planets have been discovered by the Kepler Telescope, and it is becoming clear to scientists that there are Earth-like planets "everywhere," according to Kepler scientist Tom Barclay. Two of the planets are 1,200 light years away, and the other is 2,700 light years distant.

Kepler 62f and Kepler 62e are the closest to Earth-like. They both orbit a somewhat dimmer star than our own in the constellation Lyra, 1,200 light years away. Traveling at 99% of the speed of light, a starship would pass one day for every year that would pass on Earth. Such a ship could reach the newly discovered solar system in about 6 ship years, but more than a millennium would pass on Earth.
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