26 “New” Planets

When the folks who created Star Trek nearly half a century ago decided to start the show with the words, “Space:  The Final Frontier,” they weren’t joking.

Even today, there are huge areas of space that humans have yet to lay eyes on – and hundreds, maybe thousands of undiscovered planets.

Late last month, NASA announced the discovery of 26 “new” planets.

By “new,” the scientists don’t mean the planets just formed.

They mean we’ve never seen those planets before.

In the past three years, NASA has confirmed the existence of at least 60 new planets, thanks to its Kepler space telescope – a telescope so powerful that it can see things thousands of light years away.

(A light year is the distance you could travel in a single year if you traveled at the speed of light.)

None of the 26 newly discovered planets are nearby.

According to MSNBC’s Alan Boyle, the closest one is 623 light years away.

And the furthest is 4,064 light years away.

And experts say you couldn’t live on any of them, because they’re way too hot – hundreds of degrees too hot.

But the search for another Earth-like planet continues.

Kepler has already found at least one such planet – although it’s so far away you couldn’t get there in a normal human lifetime.

And the telescope has reportedly detected more than 2,300 other possible planets that still have not been confirmed.

“This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits,” said NASA scientist Doug Hudgins, in an interview with the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.

The Kepler telescope is expected to remain up and running at least through this November.

And NASA is reportedly trying to get more money from the government to extend the project.

After all, there are almost certainly hundreds of whole new worlds out there, waiting to be discovered.

“There is more diversity out there than our limited imaginations could come up with,” Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov told Boyle, “which is good.”