If you’re in the mood for a road trip and have a few hundred million years to kill, we have the destination for you.

About 40 light-years away, orbiting a dim, cool red star called Trappist-1 are seven planets.

One of them, scientists have revealed in two papers published Monday, may be habitable to life as we know it.

Trappist-1e is a rocky exoplanet – a name for planets outside our solar system – that would take you 453million years by car to travel to.

While most of the other six exoplanets in the star system have proved to be barren rocks, Trappist-1e may have an atmosphere not too far off Earth’s, according to the findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dr Ryan MacDonald, a lecturer in extrasolar planets at the University of St Andrews and one of the paper’s lead authors,

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