The search for habitable exoplanets has made a discovery in an unexpected place: data that had supposedly been searched years ago. Scientists combing over early data from the Kepler space telescope have found an Earth-like planet, Kepler-1649c, buried in earlier data. It has a radius just 1.06 times larger than humanity’s homeworld, and its red dwarf host provides about 75 percent of the light our planet gets — not great, but enough to put it in the habitable zone.
You can chalk down the mistake to the limitations of current technology. A working group reviewed the work of the Robovetter algorithm used to spot false positives in the planet search, and realized that the code had inadvertently dismissed 1649c.
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