Hailed as a massive breakthrough, Kepler-186f is the first confirmed Earth-sized planet to orbit a distant star in its habitable zone and is often referred to as “Earth’s cousin,” the Inquisitr previously reported. Both these exoplanets are found in the “Goldilocks zone,” or habitable region, of their respective stars, meaning that their distance from the parent star is just right for the surface temperature to allow the build-up of liquid water. Using the available information, astronomers made simulations to study the planet's spin axis dynamics- these are metrics that determine just how much a planet tilts on its axis and how that tilt evolves over time. Now, new research out of Georgia Tech University has analyzed the planet's spin and axial tilt and found that its tilt is stable like Earth's, which makes it likely Kepler 186f also has regular seasons and a stable climate. "Mars is in the habitable zone in our solar system, but its axial tilt has been very unstable—varying from zero to 60 degrees," said Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Gongjie Li, who led the study together with graduate student Yutong Shan from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Earth has had pretty stable seasons over millions of years, while the instability of the Martian seasons has caused much of its surface water to evaporate, leaving it baren and dry. We don’t know whether they possess moons, but our calculations show that even without satellites, the spin axes of Kepler-186f and 62f would have remained constant over tens of millions of years.” says Gongjie Li, a professor who led the study, in a press statement. The exoplanet has a radius 10 percent larger than that of Earth and orbits its parent star — a red dwarf cooler than our sun, notes Space.com — every 130 days. Found in 2014, Kepler-186f is part of a five-planet star system located 500 light-years away from our planet, in the Cygnus constellation (the “Swan”), notes the Daily Mail. Things play out with a degree of similarity in the Kepler system, where 186f interacts with the similarly named exoplanet Kepler-62f. There's still not enough information to say for sure that either planet has liquid water or life, but as the years go on, both seem to become more worthy of a closer look.
A NASA study finds exoplanets Kepler-186f and Kepler-62f have stable axial tilts to allow for moderate seasons, making it more likely that the planets are habitable.