Earth-sized Planet That Could be Habitable

NASA have discovered a planet that may be habitable and may also hold liquid water just like earth.

The planet, named Kepler-186f, was first spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. It rotates around a star which is about 490 light-years from Earth. It is the fifth and outermost planet circling the M dwarf star Kepler-186 in the Milky Way and orbits at a distance of 32.5 million miles (52.4 million kilometres)

Elisa Quintana, of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Centre said, “This is the first definitive Earth-sized planet found in the habitable zone around another star… The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf”

The new-found planet has a radius almost same in size as Earth’s and an orbital period of 130 days. Besides being in the zone where liquid water is possible, “there’s a very excellent chance that it does have a rocky surface like the Earth”. More detailed talk on this discovery is on this blog post by Space.com.

What do you think of this new discovery?