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    FancyEnglish             Habitable Planet?             百科知识

       December 7, 2011

　

(CNN Student News) -- December 7, 2011 Habitable Planet? AZUZ: Well, yesterday, we brought you headlines from near and far, far away. Today, we`re going a little bit farther, like 600 light years. A light year is the distance that light travels in a year, and 600 light years away is where NASA scientists say they`ve discovered the first confirmed planet in what they call the habitable zone. That means, in theory, this planet could have liquid water on its surface. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AZUZ (voice-over): It was found during the Kepler mission, which cost around $600 million. Back in 2009, NASA launched this giant telescope out into space. It`s exploring the Milky Way galaxy for stars and their nearby planets. Scientists are looking for planets that could be like Earth. This one, which is called Kepler-22b, is the first one that NASA says it`s found that could be similar to ours. Chad Myers looks at the comparisons. CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Here`s what we know. We have our sun and we have this blue line -- that`s our Earth`s rotation, our orbit around our sun. The sun that they found up here, Kepler -- between the Kepler-22 system, slightly smaller than our sun, slightly cooler than our sun, but the same type of class, the same type of sun. And then they found this planet, rotating around it, almost the exact same distance away. In fact, we take 365 days to go around, or at least approximately. This planet takes 290 days to go around. So it`s almost in the exact perfect spot. (END VIDEO CLIP)