The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration held a press conference today announcing newly discovered Earth-sized planets orbiting a single star in the Trappist-1 system.
Three of the seven Earth-sized planets are found within the star's habitable zone, meaning liquid water, and even more amazingly, life, could exist on the planets' surfaces.
We won't be taking any trips there anytime soon, unfortunately. While the star system is located nearby in a cosmological sense, it's still around 40 light years away.
That means even at the speed of light, the trip takes 40 Earth years.
The planets were observed with the Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared telescope launched in 2003. Spitzer was never intended to study exoplanets, but it was re-engineered from Earth by NASA to detect dips in light as the planets pass in front of the star. The dip in light level provides insight into the planets' approximate sizes.
NASA didn't peer through its telescope and see alien life waving back, but the discovery of planets in the habitable zone with the possibly of atmospheres capable of supporting surface water is an exciting step toward finding life outside Earth.
While we won't be traveling to any of the planets in our lifetimes, NASA approved a Mars mission in 2018 to further study our closest neighbor for future human visitation.
Seth Macy is IGN's weekend web producer and just wants to be your friend. Follow him on Twitter @sethmacy, or subscribe to Seth Macy's YouTube channel.
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