围绕红矮星运行

This artist’s concept from 2015 shows exoplanet Kepler-1649c orbiting around its host red dwarf star. This exoplanet is in its star’s habitable zone (the distance where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface) and is the closest to Earth in size and temperature found to that date in data from the Kepler mission.

The Kepler mission was specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets.

Image Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter

这幅来自2015年的艺术家概念图展示了外行星开普勒-1649c围绕其宿主红矮星运行。这颗系外行星位于其恒星的宜居带（即行星表面可能存在液态水的距离），是开普勒任务数据中迄今为止发现的在大小和温度上最接近地球的行星。

开普勒任务是专门设计来调查我们所在的银河系区域，在宜居带或宜居带附近发现数百个地球大小或更小的行星，并确定我们星系中数千亿颗恒星中可能存在此类行星的比例。

影像来源：NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter