Fancy a trip to Planet Hop – voted best “hab zone” vacation within 12 parsecs of Earth.
This is the information on a recent travel poster produced by NASA!
Beware though – a parsec equals about 3.26 light years so with current technology, it might take you a while to get there.
The poster has been produced as part of latest information from NASA about the discovery of the most Earth-sized planets found in the habitable zone of a single star, called TRAPPIST-1.
What makes the discovery so exciting is that all seven of the planets have the potential for water (and therefore life) as TRAPPIST-1 is relatively cool for a star.
Because it doesn’t burn as brightly as other stars, scientists are also able to look at it in more detail with telescopes – even though it is around 40 light years away.
I just love NASA’s fantasy travel information for one of the planets: “Take a trip with the Exoplanet Travel Bureau to the fourth planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system, TRAPPIST-1e, a world swimming in water in perpetual twilight. Its sister planets gracefully light up the sky, promising another adventure just a hop away.” Makes my summer holiday to Portugal sound really boring now!
Don’t expect us to find little green men just yet though. Although some form of life on these seven planets is possible, it is still considered to be extremely difficult.
Victoria Meadows, principal investigator for the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory, says: The majority of life we find out there is likely to be single cell, relatively primitive life. That’s the sort of thing we’d be looking for on planets orbiting these M-dwarfs.”
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/trappist1/
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1416/earth-sized-planets-the-newest-weirdest-generation/