Scientists have recently discovered 85 new habitable planets. This means that, similar to earth, they are all in that sweat spot around their star. They are not so far that they are freezing cold, but they are also not so close that they are burning hot. Earth is, obviously, the best example of this. As the third planet from our sun, its climate allows for plants, animals, and humans to live.
Similar to our solar system, every other star has a zone like this. The larger and hotter stars’ zone may be far away, and the smaller cooler stars’ zone may be close, but all stars have one. However, many stars do not have a planet whose orbit is in its habitable zone. This makes it sort of rare to find a solar system with a planet in this optimal distance from its star.
These 85 planets were discovered using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a telescope designed to look for these types of planets. To find a planet, scientist use the satellite to find a blip or missing spot in the light from a star. From this they can assume that there is something in the way of the star. Then they watch the star until they see a similar absence of light to affirm that it is an orbiting planet and not an asteroid or something. From here they study the planet further and time how long it takes for it to do a single orbit. Based on this they can do the math to find out how far away the planet is from the star. This is when they determine that a planet is habitable. Depending on the size of the star, if the planet orbits in that area, they can tell it is habitable.
What does habitable really mean? It means that there is a possibility that some sort of life could exist on the planet. It is important to understand that there are countless factors other than earth’s distance from the sun that allow humans to live the way that we do. The likelihood of humans being able to live as we do here on another planet is very slim, but this does not mean that other lifeforms cannot exist. For instance, a planet may have a good climate for human life, but have toxic chemicals that only small microbes can live in.
It is also important to know that these planets are many lightyears away. For those unfamiliar, that means it takes light, the fastest thing in the universe, years of time just to get there. To place that in context, the furthest humans have gone into space so far, only takes light about a second and a half to reach. So, we as a civilization are still quite far away from being able to travel to such planets so far away.
In the end, our ambitions to move to another planet are still just hopes, but evidence continues to show that we may not be they only life in our universe.
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