NASA Found A Second Earth In The Abandoned Data From A Retired Telescope

A year and a half ago, the Kepler space telescope sent to space by NASA used up its fuel after almost a decade surveying the wider cosmos to search for alien worlds. By the end of its mission, Kepler found over 2,600 weird, exciting exoplanets.

And now, despite its retirement, the telescope still provides NASA scientists with valuable data. While re-examining the data, they discovered an exoplanet that almost resembles Earth regarding the size, temperature, as well as the orbits in its star’s habitable zone.

Announced earlier this month, the discovery brings us closer to having habitability out of the Solar system. Named Kepler-1649c, the exoplanet is just 1.06 times bigger than Earth and probably has similar temperatures since the amount of light it gets from the Sun is 75% that of our Earth.

So far, we have found about 4,000 exoplanets, some of which are closer to Earth’s size while others have similar temperatures. But none of them have both factors close to those of Earth like Kepler-1649c. Even better, the newly found exoplanet is quite close to our home planet, just 300 light-years from Earth.

However, before we can decide if it’s really habitable for humans, we need to consider a few things.

Kepler-1649c, unlike Earth, orbits around a red dwarf star, which is the most common in the galaxy. This type of star is also the smallest, coolest, whose mass is around 0.08-0.6 times the Sun’s mass. In addition, they are known for stellar flare-ups, in which their magnetic energy increases suddenly. NASA says that this kind of incident can make it challenging to live on the exoplanet.

At the same time, scientists are not sure about its atmosphere, an important factor affecting its temperature as well as the feasibility of hosting human life. And a year on the exoplanet equals just 19.5 days on Earth.

However, other signs show that Kepler-1649c has good potential to become our second home after Earth. There is another planet in the star system, a rocky planet that’s nearly as large as the exoplanet. But it orbits the star twice closer as Kepler-1649c.

These two planets orbit in almost perfect periods. Specifically, each time the outer planet in the system orbits four times around the host star, the inner one orbits almost nine times. The stable ratio indicates that the system is stable and may survive a long time, NASA says.

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