NASA's Awesome Travel Posters For Real Exoplanets

Back in 2009, NASA launched a telescope called Kepler into space in the hopes of discovering planets that share similar qualities with Earth. Now JPL - NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory - has created some very cool fake travel posters for some of the real exoplanets that Kepler has found. We've featured some awesome fake travel posters on the site before (look here, here, and here for just a few examples), but I don't think we've ever featured any for real planets that could potentially be inhabited by the human race one day. Pretty rad, huh?

Twice as big in volume as the Earth, HD 40307g straddles the line between 'Super-Earth' and 'mini-Neptune' and scientists aren't sure if it has a rocky surface or one that's buried beneath thick layers of gas and ice. One thing is certain though: at eight times the Earth's mass, its gravitational pull is much, much stronger.

Like Luke Skywalker's planet 'Tatooine' in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn.

Kepler-186f is the first Earth-size planet discovered in the potentially 'habitable zone' around another star, where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. Its star is much cooler and redder than our Sun. If plant life does exist on a planet like Kepler-186f, its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star's red-wavelength photons, making for a color palette that's very different than the greens on Earth. This discovery was made by Kepler, NASA's planet hunting telescope.

H/T: Gizmodo