Scientists Find New Earthlike Planets, Novelist Imagines Living There

It's a staple of science fiction: A city-size starship leaves our solar system, its passengers propagate on a trip that spans multiple generations and settle a planet several light-years from home. Alpa Centauri, the nearest star system, is often featured in these stories. The scifi author Kim Stanley Robinson made Tau Ceti, nearly three times as far away, the destination for a generation ship in his 2015 novel, Aurora, because he thought the system was more likely to have a habitable environment.

Life may not imitate art in this case, but they do kind of orbit each other. A team of international scientists, including a NASA researcher, has identified three Earth-size planets that might be candidates if real-life future humans ever set out to reach a habitable exoplanet, or worlds orbiting other stars.