This artist's concept shows exoplanet Kepler-1649c orbiting around its host red dwarf star.
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