NASA Discovers 7 New Habitable Planets!

An exciting discovery was announced by NASA yesterday when they revealed that the TRAPPIST ( Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope) observatory in Chile had honed in on a zone 40 light years from Earth containing 7 previously undiscovered Earth like exoplanets.

The unique thing about this discovery is that the planets closely orbit a star much like our sun only with a much lower core temperature known as ultra-cool dwarf meaning that the planets orbit much closer to their host star than the planets in our own solar system. The planets are situated in such a way so as to pass by one another in close orbit, to a hypothetical observer standing on the surface of one of the planets the others would appear nearer than the moon appears in the sky to the Earth as they whizz by in their trajectories around the low temperature dwarf star.

Scientists are calling this newly discovered solar system TRAPPIST-1 and predict that there is a good chance that at lease 3 of the planets situated in the habitable zone around the star have surface water, they also predict mesmerising, rocky sci-fi like landscapes as seen in this artist's impression:

The full article from NASA can be found here.

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