Major Space Discovery: Astronomers Discover Potentially ‘Habitable’ Exoplanets Orbiting Dwarf Star

Here are some of the major differences.

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. The kinds of planets you could walk around on seem to be the sort of place where life could flourish based on our experience here on Earth.

This week, NASA revealed a groundbreaking discovery in the form of a new solar system that could potentially support alien life.

“Look at the conditions between Mars, Earth, and Venus, and Saturn’s moon Titan”, Zalucha says. “Now we found three of them, and at the right distance too”. Because they orbit a star called TRAPPIST-1, they are known as TRAPPIST-1a, 1b, 1c, etc. The seven planets of TRAPPIST-1 are all Earth-sized and terrestrial, according to research published in 2017 in the journal Nature. If these stars are separated by the same distance as the Earth and the Sun, it would be very hard for a planet to have a stable orbit. They will also share data about the atmospheric compositions or observations made about the seven planets and their host star after the studies have been analyzed by through scientific peer review processes. Astronomers feared that would make the planets too hot on the day side and too cold on the night side to be habitable.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, said these exoplanets ― planets that orbit a star other than our sun ― provide perhaps the very best opportunity for scientists to answer once and for all whether humans are alone in the universe.

When NASA talks about finding life on other worlds its referring to microorganisms not full blown Star Trek style aliens, but that hasn’t stopped the TRAPPIST-1 discovery team from hosting a website with a number of science fiction stories. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces. For example, on comets (which don’t have atmospheres), water ice sublimates directly into a vapor when it is heated by the sun.

Of course, if colonization is the goal, mankind must first find a way to traverse the 39-light-year-long gulf between our sun and TRAPPIST-1. The Webb telescope has seven times the light-collecting capacity of Hubble and is sensitive enough to detect a single firefly 1 million kilometers, or more than 621,000 miles away. Being there, the Trappist-1 planets now make searching for life in the galaxy imminent.

As scientists celebrate this new discovery, some theoreticians argue that since these planets are closely orbiting their star, they might receive a lot of ultraviolet radiation. But the orbital period of these planets is slightly upset by their neighbors.

As scientists begin to acquire data about atmospheres on any or all of these seven planets, “that’s going to change what we think the temperature is at the surface, and whether or not there could be liquid water and, therefore, life”, she says. Even if we can’t go there just yet, we can at least look – and there’s plenty of work to go around on that front. There’s some debate about whether or not a tidally locked planet could host life. Such a spin means the same side of a planet faces the star throughout the planet’s orbit, giving it a day side and a night side.