Possible Habitable Planet in Nearby Star System
What’s cool about this is that so far we’ve only discovered about 200 planets outside our solar system, so my guess is the number of discoveries will only continue to grow over the next century – and maybe just one of those planets will be like Earth:
In recent years, with improving technology, researchers have found a handful of systems that could harbor life-bearing planets, in theory at least. A nearby star called 55 Cancri is one of the leading candidates.
The 55 Cancri system involves three gas giant planets and another world that could be icy or rocky and is about the size of Neptune. The setup is 41 light-years from Earth and about 4.7 billion years old, comparable to our Sun.
Astronomers have said since 2002, when a planet was found at about the same orbital distance from 55 Cancri as Jupiter is from the Sun, that the star had the potential to harbor an Earth-sized world.