Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Narrator: NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a star outside of our solar system. The newly discovered planet is called Kepler-186f and is about 10 percent larger than Earth. Elisa Quintana: Kepler-186f is the first validated Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of its star. It's the outmost of five planets to orbit a star that is smaller and cooler than the sun. This planet orbits its star every 130 days and so this places it in the habitable zone, where it's in a region where it could have liquid water on its surface. Narrator: Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. Thomas Barclay: This planet, Kepler-186f, orbits a star that is cooler and dimmer than the sun. So while we may have found a planet that is the same size as Earth and receives a similar amount of energy as to what Earth receives, it orbits a very different star. So, perhaps instead of an Earth twin, we've discovered an Earth cousin. Narrator: On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset. Scientists believe Kepler-186f is likely to be a rocky world, but are unable to confirm its mass and density. Thomas Barclay: This is one of the big milestones that we've been looking for in our attempts to find out if there are places just like home and if there's life out there. One of the big steps is to say "Is there somewhere that looks, to all intents and purposes, like Earth?" Well, we don't know just yet, but we know that there are at least places that look similar. Narrator: Managed by NASA's Ames Research Center, the Kepler mission collected this data using a space-based telescope to search one part of the galaxy for potentially habitable planets. (Electronic Sounds of Data Musical Tones)
B1 kepler habitable earth star habitable zone planet NASA's Kepler Discovers First Earth-Size Planet In The Habitable Zone of Another Star 385 33 richardwang posted on 2014/04/25 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary