Nasa finds Earth-size planet that could be habitable

NASA, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, recently discovered an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star, and it could be habitable.

The exoplanet, dubbed TOI 700e, is the fourth discovered in the TOI 700 system and sits 100 light-years away. A “100 light-years” is a distance, specifically, the distance light travels in 100 years. This distance is roughly equal to 587,845,000,000,000 miles. That’s 587 trillion, 845 billion miles.

This means that if humans were to try to reach TOI 700e, we would need to be travelling at the speed of light, which is 1.7 billion km/h. And even at that speed, it would take 100 years to get there.

A Nasa research team presented the results at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society hosted in Seattle on January 10.

According to Nasa, “TOI 700 is the small, cool dwarf star at the centre of the system, home also to the recently discovered planets TOI 700 b, c and d.”

Just two out of the four planets fall within the habitable “goldilocks” zone, where the distance between the planet and star is at a point that can sustain liquid water, meaning the conditions could be right for life. Earth is within the goldilocks zone in our solar system.

“This is one of only a few systems with multiple, small, habitable-zone planets that we know of,” Emily Gilbert, a post-doctoral fellow at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who led the work, said.

The scientists used data from Nasa’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to identify the new planet, which is 95% of Earth’s size and likely rocky. Planet e takes 28 days to orbit its star, while d has a 37-day orbit.

The researchers believe the planets are probably tidally locked, meaning they only spin once per orbit, so one side always faces the star, similar to how Earth only sees one side of the Moon.

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