I'm excited to announce today that dr.
Bikel Jian and his team have used our
Spitzer Space Telescope to determine
that they're actually seven earth sized
planets orbiting the nearby Trappist one
star about 40 light years away what's
more you can see in this illustration is
that three of these planets marked in
green are in the habitable zone where
liquid water can pool on the surface in
fact with the right atmospheric
conditions that could be water on any of
these planets so for the first time we
found as many terrestrial planets around
a single star and that's the first time
we have been able to measure in addition
to that both the masses and the radii of
these habitable zone type earth sized
planets these planets are among the best
in of all the planets we know to follow
up to see for example with the James
Webb Space Telescope that we're going to
launch last year the atmospheres and
also to look at bio signatures if there
are any the discovery gives us a hint
that finding a second earth is not just
a matter of if but when
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