Signs of Life

NASA has discovered a planet that looks at lot like Earth. Scientists are now looking for signs of life. The women coming to the tomb Sunday morning, however, were not.

For as long as humans have been looking at the stars, we've wondered if there's life on distant planets. In our imagination, we picture distant worlds where aliens exist — aliens who either look very much like us, or who look very much unlike us. These are creatures whom we might one day get to know, or, if a lot of science fiction is correct, we may get to run screaming from.

NASA, of course, is always on the case. With new technology like the Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have been looking deeper into space for more signs of potentially habitable, perhaps life-sustaining, planets that look more like our own.

Recently, they found one such cousin to Earth approximately 500 light years away. Given that light travels 5.88 trillion miles in one year, well, you do the math. It's a long way!

NASA has named the planet Kepler-186f, and its discovery "is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," says Paul Hertz, director of the space agency's Astrophysics...