The most Earth-like exoplanets

No telescope can yet tell us whether any planet outside the solar system has oceans, let alone life. What we can do is take what has been measured — a planet’s mass or size, how far it orbits from its star, how bright that star is — and ask what a world like that would most likely be. This list does exactly that: each of the 5,588 confirmed exoplanets TerraForge can simulate is run through the same physics model as a planet you build yourself, and these are the 50 that come out with the highest habitability score.

The first thing you will notice is how few of them look like Earth. 46 of the 50 come out as water worlds: planets in the right temperature range for liquid water but heavier than Earth, which the model expects to hold far more water than our planet does — deep global oceans rather than continents. That is not a quirk of the list. Most temperate planets found so far are “super-Earths” a few times Earth’s mass, because small planets are much harder to detect (see why most known exoplanets are hot giants).

Many planets share the top score, so ties are ordered by how close the planet runs to Earth’s own average of 288 K (15 °C), and then by distance. Kepler-1652 b leads the list at 291 K. The closest one to us is GJ 887 d, about 11 ly away. Treat the score as a model’s best guess from a handful of numbers, not a finding about any real world.