- Astronomy
- April 13, 2023
In the Goldilocks zone of our galaxy, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. In the Cygnus constellation, Kepler-186f is around 500 light-years away from Earth. The region of space surrounding a star where planetary-mass objects with appropriate atmospheric pressure may maintain liquid water on their surfaces is known as the habitable zone, commonly referred to as the Goldilocks zone.
This is the first Earth-sized planet discovered in another star’s habitable zone, despite the fact that there are thought to be at least 40 billion planets the size of Earth orbiting our Milky Way Galaxy.
The Kepler-186f system has four more planets orbiting a neighboring star in addition to Kepler-186f. This suggests that the likelihood of life existing on a planet greatly improves if its neighboring star is similar to our Sun.
“We know of only one planet on which life may exist – Earth.” “When we seek for life outside our solar system, we focus on finding planets with traits similar to Earth,” said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and main author of the work published in the journal Science. “Discovering a habitable zone planet the size of Earth is a significant breakthrough.”
The Sun in our solar system is half as massive and smaller as Kepler-186f, and it gets just one-third of the energy that we do. Every 130 days, Kepler-186f circles its star.
