Specifically, Plato will discover and study planets in orbits up to the 'Goldilocks' region, the habitable zone around the star where the temperature is just right for liquid to exist on a planet ...

Said Krenn: "PLATO's photometric instrument will be precise enough to detect the transit of an Earth-like planet orbiting a solar-like star using a single transit event. Supported by its stellar ...

New tools like the PLATO mission and proposed LIFE mission promise to aid the search, but they take time. A full year of observations might be needed to detect just one planet. So, to speed things ...