By James Pero For Dailymail.com
Published: 22:05 GMT, 26 March 2019 | Updated: 22:14 GMT, 26 March 2019
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A team of astronomers has identified nearly 2,000 stars set to be studied for habitable, Earth-like exoplanets.
The astronomers -- hailing from Cornell, Lehigh and Vanderbilt universities -- have narrowed their search down from a whopping 250,000 stars.
The search will employ NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is capable of scanning 85 percent of the entire sky.
Instruments aboard the satellite are sensitive enough to spot Earth-size planets that may be orbiting around 1,823 of those identified stars.
A team of astronomers has identified nearly 2,000 stars set to be studied for habitable, Earth-like exoplanets. Overall, there are a sprawling 470 million stars observable by TESS
'Our ambition is to not only detect hundreds of Earth-like worlds in other solar systems, but to find them around our closest neighboring solar systems," Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy Keivan Stassun said in a statement.
'In a few years' time, we may very well know that there are other out there, with breathable atmospheres.'
Among the factors key to NASA's search for habitable exoplanets are their proximity to the orbiting star as well as the type of star.
In a statement researchers said they will observe 'bright, cool, dwarfs' with the closest being four light-years away.
In the event that TESS identifies a planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth's, researchers say the next step -- figuring out whether or not it already contains life -- will be trickier task.
Identifying life for some further out and colder planets
