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A recently discovered planet about 1,200 light-years away might be more habitable than Earth, according to scientists.
This information will be used when choosing which objects to focus our attention on as potentially habitable spaces.
This improves upon a previous method which relied heavily on the 'Goldilocks zone' or habitable zone - the range of orbits around a sun with the right temperature to support liquid water.
The exoplanet is described a super-Earth - its mass and radius are bigger than Earth's but smaller than Uranus and Neptune - and it has an equilibrium temperature of -40 degrees.
About the new measuring index, one of the paper's lead authors, Rory Barnes from the University of Washington's Virtual Planetary Laboratory, said: "Basically, we've devised a way to take all the observational data that are available and develop a prioritisation scheme, so that as we move into a time when there are hundreds of targets available, we might be able to say, 'Okay, that's the one we want to start with'."
The actual habitability of Kepler-442b is uncertain because its atmosphere and surface are unknown.
After successfully landing robots on the red planet, NASA is continuing its plans to send humans up to join them.
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