[ad_1]
This illustration from NASA imagines what the surface of Kepler-1649c would look like.
NASA / Ames Research Center / Daniel Rutter
From nasa now removed from the Kepler space telescope It is the mission that continues giving On Wednesday, NASA announced the discovery of what could be a very Earth-like exoplanet lurking in ancient Kepler data.
Kepler ran out of fuel and went to sleep in 2018, but scientists are still reviewing the observations he made during his epic search for planets beyond our own solar system.
Kepler-1649c is 300 light years from Earth. NASA described it as “the most similar in size and estimated temperature to Earth” of the thousands of exoplanets discovered by Kepler. The planet is located in the habitable zone of its star, a region where liquid water may exist.
The fascinating exoplanet is slightly larger than Earth. It receives 75% of the amount of light we get from our own sun, which could also align it with Earth’s temperatures. The planet was originally misidentified by a computer algorithm, but a team of scientists found it during a review of the Kepler data.
This NASA graphic shows Earth compared to exoplanet Kepler-1649c.
NASA / Ames Research Center / Daniel Rutter
“This intriguing and distant world gives us even greater hope that a second Earth is among the stars, waiting to be found,” said Thomas Zurbuchen of NASA.
Don’t pack your bags yet. The exoplanet may look promising, but it won’t necessarily be Earth 2.0.
Kepler-1649c is in orbit around a red dwarf, a type of star that NASA says is “known for stellar outbreaks that can make a planet’s environment a challenge to any potential life.” The space agency also warned that Kepler-1649c’s atmosphere remains a mystery and that size calculations may be disabled.
The international research team that discovered the exoplanet published an article about it in April in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“With red dwarfs almost everywhere around our galaxy, and these potentially habitable and rocky little planets around them, the possibility that one of them is not much different from our Earth seems a little brighter,” said the Lead author Andrew Vanderburg of the University of Texas at Austin.
We don’t know if there is another Earth among Kepler’s many exoplanets, but this latest discovery is the fuel for the dream of someday finding life beyond our solar system.
See this:
NASA and the Roscosmos astronauts take off into the …
8:52
