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Someone needs to lecture science reporters on “earth like”.

No true definition would say it can mean anything much different than where life on this earth as we know it could live, because anything less is not like earth enough to be called “earth like”.

Anything less is click bait using the term “earth like” for objects in space they know, in many ways cannot truly be “earth like” as well as objects they know far to little about to attribute “earth like” to them. The article in fact includes examples of both of those kinds of disqualifiers.

A planet with a lone attribute of being a distance from its sun (a very different sun) that is similar to earth’s distance from our sun, does not qualify it as “earth like”.

We need someone important to stand up and lecture the entire science reporting media on the use and misuse of a term like “earth like”.

Yes earth revolves within a certain mean distance around its sun. It also has a particular sun, and that particular sun contributes to what is this earth and its environment. If our rocky orb revolved around a very different sort of son, even at a similar distance as our earth does, we would not likely find it was “earth like”.

Our earth has its own magnetic field (not all planets do) and that field plays a prominent role in the evolution of things on this earth. A planet orbiting a sun at a similar distance to its sun, as our earth is to our sun, but that planet not having its own magnetic field would make it not “earth like” because how different it would be due to that difference alone.

Our earth has a certain mass and by that a certain gravity. A different gravity would have a different influence on what atmosphere, if any, stayed close to the planet. A planet revolving a distance from its sun similar to the distance earth revolves around our sun, but with very different mass and gravity, will likely have either a more dense (greater gravity) or less dense (less gravity) and more or less atmospheric pressure than earth, and that will not be “earth like”.

I could go on and on, but the point is that our earth has certain (many) attributes that go in to making it EARTH, and a mere one, or two or a few of such attributes will NEVER by themselves make a planet sufficiently “earth like” to be worthy of the title.

I hope you understand I am not ranting at you, just the so called “science writers” and the sloppy scientists who permit the use of sloppy terms to get news of their “discoveries” read.