The Everlasting Search
for Life
By Grant Regen
The Kepler Space Telescope was leading the search for habitable planets. It has found 132 confirmed planets and has 2,740 planet candidates. While these numbers of planets may seem high, there are many other planets still to be found. Kepler also only searched a very small part of our sky. The main goal of Kepler was to find exoplanets, or planets out of our solar system, that can harbor life. So far, the identified planets most like earth in size and still in the habitable zone are Kepler-69c, Kepler-62e, and Kepler-62f. There are also many smaller projects looking at different parts of the sky for habitable planets. While the distances of these planets are in light years, a much closer possibility of past life may still hold true.