Did NASA Find a Second Earth?

An exoplanet is a planet that orbits another star.

We now know that the galaxy is littered with planets.

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NASA is now shifting away from, are there planets?

And now the question is,

are there life on any of these planets?

We're so excited specifically about the discovery

of Proxima Centauri b.

This particular planet is indeed

in the habitable zone of its star.

So that's a good sign, if water exists,

it could be in a liquid form.

The mass of the planet, even though we don't know

the exact mass, it looks like the minimum mass

is roughly that of the Earth, slightly heavier.

This planet is showing all the right signs

to be consistent with life.

But what we don't know, does it have any gases

like water vapor, or oxygen, or methane,

or carbon dioxide that a planet

would desperately need if it has an atmosphere?

That would be huge to know.

And that's what these future missions

or extremely large telescopes

that we're going to build for the next decade,

they're going to tell us if it has an atmosphere.

And if it has an atmosphere, now we're feeling

even more optimistic about the possibilities of life.

It's pretty hard to imagine traveling to these exoplanets,

'cause they typically are 10, 20 hundredths

of light years away.

This new planet is a bit of a game-changer

because now it's four light years away.

With the fastest spacecraft that man has ever built,

it would still take us 75,000 years to get there.

Space travel's going to take a long time,

but I think this discovery is going to motivate all of us

to come up with technologies to get us there.

For the rest of mankind, we will never have a star

any closer to us than this particular star.

And then the planets that it may have

are all going to be planets that we can feast on

in looking for signs of life.