Hello again, it's Howard Hughes in London at the home of the unexplained on a rainy day

in London town at the back end of July. I wanted to get this item out to you as soon as

possible. It's a short interview that will be included in a future edition of the unexplained.

About NASA's announcement just hours ago from when I'm recording this, of the discovery

of an Earth-like planet a long way away from here. Very, very exciting stuff has enormous

potential. Will he or more about this? But as soon as I read this news, I got in touch with

Heather Cooper, British astronomer very well known around the world. You may well have seen her

television documentaries or read her books. She's been on this show many times before and I've

known her for more than 20 years. So first thing I did was get Heather's reaction.

Okay, Heather, new planet, lot like Earth, very exciting.

Absolutely, yes, it goes by the name of Kepler 452B, which is a very exciting name.

And the reason why it's called Kepler 452B, it was discovered by an orbiting space probe

which looks at stars and watches them as their light dims very, very briefly with a planet

passes in front of them. And to this date, it's discovered a possibility of, would you believe it,

4175 planets, not all confirmed yet, but definitely a thousand.

Heather, how did we, I think Baffles, a lot of people, but certainly me with my small brain, how do you have

a small brain? Well, it's fairly small compared with many people's, but how did we, how did we zero in

on this one place? How were we able to? Well, basically Kepler is looking at a certain area of space

and it's looking at the constellation of Cygnus as one. And if you go out at night, it's virtually

overhead is a cross shaped constellation. And it actually looks like us one, it's got a long tail

in the head and everything like that. So it was looking at that area, looking at stars in that area.

And it's homing in on stars that are like the sun. And this particular star is actually very light

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