Nasa releases incredible ‘planet hopping’ poster to advertise space tourism

Unless you were living under a rather large rock, you probably saw Nasa’s latest exoplanet discovery - a potentially habitable solar system 40 light-years away from ours, with seven earth-sized planets in its orbit.

The incredible discovery, which the space agency hailed as an "accelerated leap forward" in the search for life in space, has given new hope to the idea of humans one day inhabiting other planets.

To help drum up excitement around the news, Nasa has released a stunning space tourism poster advertising what it could be like to ‘holiday’ on a planet in the newly discovered solar system.

The tongue in cheek poster features a family gathered in a spacecraft on a 'planet hopping' holiday, gazing out onto Trappist-1e which, it says, has "been voted ‘best 'Hab Zone' vacation within 12 parsecs of Earth."

Nasa’s newly discovered seven planets have all been found huddled around the same star – Trappist-1 – in the constellation of Aquarius.

"The planet shown here [in the poster]", explain Nasa, "fourth from the TRAPPIST-1 star, is in the habitable zone, the area around the star where liquid water is most likely to be detected."

Sadly, a holiday here won’t quite be as speedy as a trip to the Algarve. The fastest human spacecraft would currently get us there in about 200,000 years.

Scientists at yesterday’s press conference, which was held in New York and streamed live on the Nasa website, explained that if we were able to travel at light-speed we would be able to reach the star in 39 years.

Meanwhile, a standard jet would take 44 million years.

Still, these posters certainly make for a nice piece of art to hang above the mantlepiece.

The Trappist-1 poster is the latest in a series of Nasa space travel posters to promote exoplanet science. Click through our gallery above to see them all.

Follow Liz Connor on Twitter: @lizconnor_