TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

An Earth-sized planet was found in Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our solar system:

Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.

The planet is much too close to its star to be habitable, but there’s no doubt that our galaxy is littered with near-Earth sized planets. As we get better at finding exoplanets, we’re finding more and more small planets. With enough of them, there is almost assuredly rocky planets in their system’s habitable zone. And with enough of those, there has to be some where conditions were similar enough to our own that life popped up.

Intelligent life may not be very prevalent (because the conditions have to be quite good and stable for it to pop up, at least in a form similar to our own), but my bet is that life is. There’s very little that excites me more than the idea that there are many planets across our galaxy with living creatures on them, and maybe even intelligent beings wondering the same thing as us—are there others out there?

It’s unfortunate that there is almost no chance that we will ever find evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy, but it is nonetheless exhilarating that we may be able to soon identify a number of planets that could sustain life as we know it.