Quote:
Ultimately, the authors of the Nature paper put the inner edge of the habitable zone – the edge closer to the sun – at 0.95 AU. The difference, 0.04 AU, doesn’t sound like much, but comes out to 3.7 million miles – and it gives Earth a decent amount of breathing room.
“This has strong implications for the possibility of liquid water existing on Venus early in its history, and extends the size of the habitable zone around other stars,” the Nature study authors wrote.
But it also means that the estimated 22 billion Earth-like planets around sun-like stars, based on a minimum distance from the sun of 0.5 AU, “could be too high by a factor of almost 2,” Kasting and Harman said.
http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...#ixzz2nOEz96Jt
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Hmmm.. so one shakey paper published gets all kinds of international media attention pontificating about "billions" of exoplanets based on extremely limited data from a now non-functioning telescope, and lo-and-behold another paper disputes those findings...