About 4.6 billion of years ago, our solar system was nothing but a solar nebula (dust particles and gas formed into a cloud) Later on a planet was forming, it’s rocky core was being brought to life with strong elements binding into one. Light material floated to the top making up the crust, the denser material sinking back to the core. Our home planet was formed. 4.5 billion years later something forty light years away is catching our attention. Lets just say that it includes a few Earth-sized exoplanets. Specifically, seven of them. And they could potentially be suitable for life.

Scientists recently found a small star located near our solar system forty light years away. Nearby the star, there are seven Earth sized planets rotating around it’s sun. They have named the system the Trappist-1 System. Researchers have concluded that the each planet may be suitable for life, considering the fact that it may have liquid water, gravity, and oxygen. Traveling one light year away would take thirty seven thousand two hundred years to just travel for one year. Now multiply that by forty. So if you were to travel to that solar system it would take you one million four hundred eighty-eight thousand years just to get there.

Though we won’t be able to send astronomers there in our lifetime, scientists are developing an idea where they will attempt to put a set of people to sleep( not the kind they do to animals.) and send them there, they will be asleep until they arrive. Once they awake, they will be able to start there own space colony. Just the thought of other planets that could possibly support life is just incredible. It’s extraordinary to see things like this unfold before us, especially when we still have so much to live up to in our lives.

• An artist’s depiction of the view from one of the planets.