This Potential Alien-Friendly Planet May Have Large Oceans

Here is a bit of background on this other similar planet as well, and what the video below covers:

The planet, known as Kepler-186f, is “more of an Earth cousin than an Earth twin,” Elisa Quintana, an astronomer at the SETI Institute at NASA Ames Research Center, told the journal Science. Quintana is the lead author of a report on the planet published by Science this week.
“This discovery does confirm that Earth-sized planets do exist in the habitable zones of other stars,” Quintana said during a Thursday news briefing at NASA Headquarters.
Kepler-186f goes around an M-type dwarf star that’s smaller and cooler than our sun. But it orbits much closer to its parent star than Earth does, within what would be Mercury’s orbit in our own solar system. Those two factors combine to produce an environment that could allow for liquid water on the surface, assuming that the planet had a heat-trapping atmosphere.

“The star, to our eyes, would look slightly orange-y,” about a third again as big as our sun but only a third as bright, said co-author Thomas Barclay, a staff scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission who is also affiliated with NASA and the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute. At midday, Kepler-186f’s landscape might look similar to what we see on Earth an hour before sunset, he told NBC News.
Or it might not: If the planet lacked an atmosphere to retain and redistribute its sun’s warmth, it would be a cold, dry, lifeless world.

It really is exciting to find these types of planetsĀ and maybe even further telescope examination will yield more clues to possible life existing on them.

thanks to space.com for the great info



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