American space research organisation NASA has discovered a system of seven Earth-sized planets that could possibly host liquid water and even life. The news is being witnessed as the biggest announcement made the organisation so far and has sent a wave of excitement among the global scientific community. The news even got tech giant Google excited and it’s celebrating this momentous feat with a celestial doodle.
The doodle shows the Earth looking into a telescope and spotting a planet in its field of view. As the Earth shares the news with the excited Moon, the lone planet is surrounded by its six siblings that wave hello to the Earth and the Moon.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope made a ground-breaking discovery by locating the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are located in the habitable zone and are most likely to have liquid water. These planets are located nearly 40 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Aquarius.
TRAPPSIT-1 (Photo: NASA)
This system of exoplanets called the TRAPPIST-1 (Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope), which is located in the Chile, is circling a dwarf star, which is roughly the size of Jupiter and is almost 200 times dimmer than the Sun.
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According to NASA, TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. However, more observations are required to determine if they have liquid water. Furthermore, though the mass of the seventh exoplanet has not been determined yet, the scientists believe that it could be as cool as a snowball.
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