Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" which is where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that a planet the size of Earth exists in the habitable zone of stars.
While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth. NASA also detected a gas which is associated with life on Earth in the Martian atmosphere, to revive the old myth of the life on Mars. NASA has also discovered what might be the youngest known star in the universe, found what looks like flowing water on Mars and mapped the weather on an object outside the solar system. They also recently discovered the oldest known stars, which are a relatively close 6,000 light-years from Earth — though not nearly as close as the previous record holder, a 13.2 billion-year-old neighbor only190 light-years from our solar system. This new discovery is about 13.6 billion years old and formed just a few hundred million years after the universe was created. Astronomers found that the star doesn't contain any iron, which forms gradually during the cycles of star death and birth, indicating that the star formed very early on in the universe's life, in the wake of the death of the very first star.
