Kepler's new

The Kepler mission should be able to detect planets the size of Earth orbiting a star similar to our Sun researchers announced after the detection by the Space Telescope extrasolar planet HAT-P-7B.

This exoplanet is one among the twenty or discovered by ground-based observatories and the CoRoT mission when they "transited" in front of their stars and then periodically reduced brightness. It is comparable in size to Jupiter and orbits a star similar to our Sun. The latter is currently in the field of the telescope Kepler launched in March 2009 to detect exoplanets the size of Earth.
In an article in Science magazine, WJ Borucki, of NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, and colleagues analyzed the equivalent of ten days of data transmitted by Kepler on the brightness of more than 50,000 stars. They found evidence showing the path of HAT-P-7b orbits its star, proof that Kepler has the required sensitivity to detect planets the size of Earth.

Source: Techno-science.net