Daily Mail
December 15, 2017
NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered an eighth planet in a distant star system called Kepler 90 – the first time a faraway star has been found to have the same number of planets orbiting it as our own sun.
Although the Kepler 90 solar system is not new, the eighth planet, Kepler 90i, is, after it was found using AI software in a groundbreaking project between Google and NASA.
The discovery of a system similar to our own raises hopes of finding alien life elsewhere in the universe.
The Kepler-90 planets have a similar configuration to our solar system, with small planets orbiting close to their star and the larger planets found farther away.
According to NASA, this confirms for the first time that distant star systems can be home to ‘families as large as our own.’
The new planet, estimated to be about 30 percent larger than Earth, is ‘not a place you’d like to visit,’ said Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin.
This article was posted: Friday, December 15, 2017 at 9:35 am
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