Some people are sure the universe supports extraterrestrial life while others remain skeptical, but if it does, this series of planets represents some of the most likely suspects, all showing different but remarkable and key similarities to Earth or other potentially life-supporting conditions.

Created by Futurism, the  infographic below highlights some of the critical features of these eight promising candidates, some similar in size, others in terms of orbital year and still others estimated to have close-to-Earth climate conditions and/or requisite materials to form the building blocks of life.

While they may range from a few dozen to thousands of light years away, there are increasingly promising spaceflight technologies being experimented with that might forever change how we view such currently-unfathomable distances. Even if they are forever out of reach, new astronomical tech may also hold the key to seeing whether these places have ever (or could) be home to other living beings.

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Are we getting even closer to finding a new cosmic home away from home? In 2010, an Earth-like planet called Gliese 581g was discovered just 20 light years from our home planet. Scientists postulated that the planet, which exists in the “Goldilocks Zone,” or the area just the right distance from the planet’s sun to support liquid water and, presumably, life, may already be home to some type of life. Since that discovery, the very existence of Gliese 581g has been mired in controversy and the scientific community can’t seem to agree on whether it even exists. That may not matter now anyway, since they’ve found a planet even closer to us and with equally intriguing stats. Gliese 832c is a hop, skip, and jump away from Earth – on the grand scale of space – at just 16 light years away.

Gliese 832c is roughly five times the size of Earth and boasts a short 36-day year. Despite its close proximity to its star, the planet isn’t a fiery mass because its star is a red dwarf which is much cooler and dimmer than our Sun. This means that the newly-found planet receives just about as much energy from its star as our own planet does. Scientists don’t hold much hope for Gliese 832c being humankind’s first extraterrestrial home, however. Due to its mass, it is likely to have a super-thick atmosphere that creates a life-crushing greenhouse effect. Still, the director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo places Gliese 832c as one of the three most Earth-like exoplanets discovered to date, and the lab plans to conduct plenty more observation of the planet.

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Ever since the unmanned Kepler Space Telescope launched in 2009, it has been on a constant mission to find Earth-like planets that could possibly support life. It has spotted thousands of planets, some of which may prove to be comparable to Earth in size, composition and distance from their stars. But on April 17, 2014, Kepler found the most likely candidate yet for an Earth-like planet.

The planet, Kepler-186f, is the first Earth-sized planet Kepler has found that exists in the “Goldilocks Zone” – the area just far enough away from a star to potentially support life. Not too hot, not too cold, and having the potential to contain liquid water. Kepler186-f is just 1.11 times Earth’s size; the next-closest Earth-like candidate was 40 percent larger than Earth.

Kepler 186-f only gets about one-third of the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, meaning that its sky would be much darker than ours. Since we know nothing about the composition of the planet or its atmosphere, however, it can’t be determined yet whether the temperature on the surface would be welcoming to life. Now that NASA knows the planet is there, they’ll have to research its chemical composition to determine whether it is capable of supporting water and, in turn, life.

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Even before NASA started providing us with stunning pictures from super-powered telescopes, we still enjoyed gazing upon images of heavenly bodies. These Victorian-era astronomy illustrations are simply beautiful, and they prove that modern technology doesn’t necessarily make for a better picture.

All created between 1868 and 1880 by the great French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, the illustrations are surprisingly sophisticated for their time. This was thanks in large part to Trouvelot’s access to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s 26 inch refractor which allowed him to see stunning astronomical detail.

It was only after seeing several auroras that Trouvelot became interested in astronomy. He was already working as an artist, so his two passions naturally combined to become a new, and quite successful, career.

The complete series of illustrations from which these selections were chosen consisted of 15 of Trouvelot’s finest. His favorite subject was the Sun, which he studied extensively. In addition to his detailed and deeply beautiful illustrations, Trouvelot published around 50 respected scientific papers. The artist and amateur scientist died in 1895, about a decade after this series was completed.

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One of the first things we’re taught about space is that every planet needs a star around which to orbit. But Einstein postulated nearly a century ago that the universe might actually be full of “homeless” planets which have no star to call their own. Now a group of Japanese researchers may have found a large number of stars that are more or less free-floating in space with no home stars, suggesting that Einstein’s theory was correct.

Exoplanets are usually detected by looking for a distinctive “wobble” of a star caused by the gravitational pull of orbiting planets. But by using a different method called gravitational micro-lensing, scientists have found as many as ten of these homeless planets that have approximately the mass of Jupiter. Gravitational micro-lensing was proposed by Einstein in 1915 and involves using the mass of an object in the foreground as a lens to magnify and distort light from objects in the background.

After two years of observing gravitational micro-lensing and identifying ten star-less planets, the researchers think that there could be twice as many free-floating planets out there as there are stars. However, the team was only able to determine that there were no stars within ten astronomical units of the planets (one AU is equal to the difference between Earth and the sun). Even in our own solar system the two (or three, if you count poor neglected Pluto) outermost planets are further from our star than that. More research is clearly needed, but the preliminary findings seem to suggest that planets can migrate significantly during their lifetimes.

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