MEXICO: Kepler Space Telescope, NASA’s planet hunting device that searches for possible second Earth in space just discovered another solar system.
It was launch in 2009 and since then, Kepler has made too many discoveries including 1,000 exoplanets and almost 4,200 exoplanet “candidates.”
Kepler even found different solar systems and recently, it just discovered a solar system that looks like our own galaxy, only it is 117 light years away.
The new solar system that Kepler found has five planets and orbits around its own star dubbed as Kepler 444. Kepler 444 is said to be 11.2 years old, more than twice as old as our sun.
According to the astronomers, Kepler 444 might provide additional information about the real age of stars or when stars started to form solar systems as well as implications of a possible alien life.
“There are far-reaching implications for this discovery,” Dr. Tiago Campante, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham and one of the astronomers who helped discover the new system, said in a written statement.
Campante and his team who are studying the Kepler 444 solar system said the planets are too close with one another and too close to Kepler 444. It falls under Goldilocks zone meaning it is warm in there but not warm enough to support life. Campante said that if Kepler 444 is too close in supporting life, maybe there is a solar system out there that can, just like Earth.
“Other similarly old planets could indeed harbor life,” he said in an email to The Huffington Post. “Think about a technologically advanced civilization that has a few billion years head start relative to us!”
Some scientists are thinking twice about this idea though.
“It is not clear that planets much older than the Earth have a higher expectation of having life than the more recently formed planets,” William Borucki, a space scientist at the NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif told HuffPost in an email. “The discovery of Kepler-444 is important, but whether it implies advanced life or no life will remain a mystery until our technology advances to the point that we can get a definitive answer.”
