It’s time to go off on our travels again, and this time we’re going to pay a visit to a star system which has not just one but multiple planets, and one of them happens to lie in the habitable zone of the star. We’re going to Kepler 186, let’s find out more.

Located about 582 light years away we find our star of interest. If you want to see it from earth, you’d have to point yourself at the constellation of Cygnus and have a pretty powerful telescope. Let’s go there now, in our space and time machine it’s just a short hop.

Let us turn our attention firstly to the star, Kepler 186. This is an M class red dwarf star, although it is a large red dwarf on the border between a red and orange star. This star is half the diameter of our sun with about half its mass as well. This means that it has about 5% the luminosity of our sun.