Habitable planets have been a key part of space exploration for quite some time now.

Although there are no habitable planets in our solar system, the Kepler Space Telescope has been searching the far reaches of space for new planets and interstellar entities.

Already, they've discovered a number of new planets - although one planet they've found is of particular importance.

Kepler-452b, known to NASA and the SETI institute, has been called 'Earth 2.0' by research scientists. Simply put, the planet orbits a star like our own, has a gravity field much like our own and is quite capable of sustaining life like our own.

"Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth," said lead scientist Dr Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

Earth 2.0 is understood to have a thick layer of atmosphere surrounding with volcanoes and a rocky surface - but what about life itself?

Researchers at NASA believe there's "substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet."

What's more, the planet is considerably bigger and older than Earth. The planet has a radius that's estimated to be approximately 60% larger than our own and two and a half billion years older than Earth.

A year on Kepler-452b would be longer only by twenty days, but the snag in possibly colonising Earth 2.0 and making it ours comes in the distance.

At our current technology, it would take roughly 48,750,000 years for us to reach it at our current speed. In other words, if we were able to travel at the speed of light - which we can't, currently - it would 1,400 years to reach Kepler-452b.

You're also getting into things like time dilation, warp-speed and all sorts of really, really technical stuff that we genuinely have no clue about.

The too long, didn't read takeaway point is the following - there's a planet very like ours that has every possibility of life evolving on it - it's just very, very, very, very far away.

So - let's talk names for this new planet. Kepler-452b doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

We're thinking something like Alderaan or Rigel-7. We're spitballing here - what's your potential name?

 

Via NASA