If we could travel physically among the stars, surely we would never get bored of it. Astronomers estimate that there are between 100 and 200 billion stars only in our Milky Way galaxy, not to mention what could await us in other galaxies. There are trillions of other galaxies, therefore possibilities of space exploration are practically endless.
And while it’s exciting to know that we have so many opportunities, it’s frustrating at the same time. Humanity didn’t even lay foot on the nearest planet, and traveling to other solar systems is for the moment utopic. But the good news is that astronomy makes a lot of progress, and telescopes are showing us images from farther regions of the Cosmos than we could ever imagine.
KOI-456.01 could support life
KOI-456.01 is an exoplanet that resembles Earth a lot, and it’s also orbiting a star that resembles the Sun: it’s dubbed as Kepler-160. The two cosmic objects complete the solar system located at about 3,000 light-years away from us. There’s no way that humans could arrive at that exoplanet during a human lifetime, so our best chance is to wait and see how science will keep evolving in the near future.
Scientists call the exoplanet as a ‘mirror image’ of the Earth and the Sun, suggesting that KOI-456.01 is capable of harboring life. One huge hint for this hypothesis is that Kepler-160 releases light in the visible spectrum rather than infrared light. Max Planck researcher René Heller declared:
KOI-456.01 is relatively large compared to many other planets that are considered potentially habitable,
But it’s the combination of this less-than-double the size of the Earth planet and its solar type host star that make it so special and familiar.
Further studies are needed for the KOI-456.01 exoplanet and its host star, but it’s nice to see that we get more options for where to search for alien life.
