(Fox News) – Scientists have discovered a potentially habitable exoplanet and its star that are a “mirror image” of the Earth and the sun. Experts from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, led an international team of astronomers in the discovery of the exoplanet-star-pair.
Exoplanet KOI-456.04 is less than twice the size of Earth, but orbits a sun-like star, explains the Max Planck Institute, in a statement. The star is just over 3,000 light-years from the solar system. A light-year, which measures distance in space, equals about 6 trillion miles.
“KOI-456.04 sits in a region of the stellar habitable zone – the distance range around a star admitting liquid surface water on an Earth-like planet – that is comparable to the Earth’s position around the Sun,” the scientists add, in the statement. Experts also note that KOI-456.04’s host star is unlike the central stars of most other exoplanets.
“Its host star, called Kepler-160, actually emits visible light; the central stars of almost all other exoplanets, on the other hand, emit infrared radiation, are smaller and fainter than the Sun and therefore belong to the class of red dwarf stars,” explains the Institute, in the statement. READ MORE
