NASA’s scientists recently discovered an Earth like planet orbiting a star within the habitable zone of our galaxy. They name it Kepler-186f and it is approximately 500 light years away from Earth in the Cygnus constellation. what are the habitat zone? well, it’s a region around a star within which planetary mass objects with enough atmospheric pressure to support liquid water on their surface. While there are estimated 40 billion other planets which are roughly the same size as Earth in our Milky Way Galaxy, this particular planet is the first Earth-size planet found inside the habitable zone of another star
The image below is just a model of how the planet will probably look like and to show its orbit around a star in the habitable zone
So what does this all mean? Are we alone in the universe or not?
There are 4 other planets that orbit a nearby star within the Keple-186f system. This means that if the nearby star is similar to our sun then the probability of life on this planet increases significantly. ” We know of just one planet where life exists – Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth, ” says Elisa Quintana who is a research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field , Calif. ” The nearby star to Kepler-186f has half the mass and size as our solar system’s sun and only receives one-third of the energy that we receive from our sun. Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130 days.
Watch a video about this amazing discovery:
Learn more about the Kepler mission in this link
Source: link
