Newly Discovered Planet - Amazing Stuff

This has nothing to do with selling a home in Charlotte NC or selling a home in Raleigh NC, but I found it pretty interesting… 

When checking out the latest stories on www.newsobserver.com this morning, I came across an article about a new planet discovered “outside our solar system” that is “eerily similar to Earth”.  It’s about 2.4 times larger than Earth, and the temperature is around 72 degrees on the surface.  The “year” for this planet circling it’s sun is about 290 days, so that too is similar to ours.

All of that is interesting, but what really struck me about this discovery is that it put the awesome size of our solar system, galaxy, and universe a little more in perspective for me.  It’s hard to comprehend the size of things, but considering that our solar system is just a very small part of our galaxy, which is a small part of the universe (and I was recently watching a show where a new theory suggests that there may actually be multiple universes, i.e. we may be part of a “Multiverse”), the following sentence helped illustrate a little bit how big the solar system is and how far away this one planet actually is…. 

“The planet is 600 light-years away. Each light-year is 5.9 trillion miles. It would take a space shuttle about 22 million years to get there.” 

22 MILLION YEARS TO GET THERE!!!  And that planet is “outside our solar system”!  They didn’t say “outside our Galaxy” or “at the far end of our universe.”  This seems to imply that it’s really not that far away relatively speaking!  Truly Amazing!

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/12/06/1692512/christmas-planet-a-lot-like-earth.html#ixzz1flVPkAEm

- Don