NASA announced recently that they discovered a new way to study planets in our solar system without leaving earth. The new technique was called “unprecedented”, because it will reduce by hundred of years the amount of time needed to study and discover other planets in our solar system.

The astronomers used NASA’s 30-year-old, 10-foot-diameter (3-meter) telescope at the space agency’s Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Using relatively small and old telescope, astronomers were able to identify organic molecules on a planet nearly 63 light years from Earth.

“The fact that we have used a relatively small, ground-based telescope is exciting because it implies that the largest telescopes on the ground, using this technique, may be able to characterize terrestrial exoplanet targets,” said Mark Swain, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the study’s lead author.