“Systems around these miniature stars are the only areas where we can find life on an Earth-sized exoplanet with our present technology”, Gillon said in a statement.
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Three planets with sizes and temperatures akin to those of the Earth and Venus are circling a dwarf star 40 light-years away.
An global team of astrophysicists have discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting near the habitable zone of a dwarf star only 40 light years away from our Earth.
Astronomers from Belgium, India, the United States and United Kingdom trained the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile onto the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 and saw three tiny planets orbiting it closely, perhaps within the solar system’s “habitable zone”. That’s pretty close in astronomical terms, considering our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years across.
The announcement came on May 2 after a group of global astronomers from MIT, NASA, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Liege and other organizations made the discovery.
It’s “much cooler and redder than the Sun and barely larger than Jupiter”, falling into the ultra-cool dwarf star group “not massive enough to sustain hydrogen fusion” and with a temperature of “less than 2,700kelvin”.
The study is published is the journal Nature. They orbit a dim dwarf star located in the constellation Aquarius.
And these planets are close enough, de Wit says, “we can study their atmosphere and composition and further down the road, which is in our generation, assess if they’re actually inhabited”.
The planets are tidally locked, which means that, like our moon, the same side of the planet always faces the celestial body it is orbiting. They’re “currently the best place to search for life beyond the solar system”, according to the study.
As a brown dwarf “failed star” TRAPPIST-1 is a very small and dim and isn’t easily visible from Earth, but it’s its very dimness that has allowed its planets to be discovered with existing technology.
The discovery also has scientists optimistic because this is the first time a star of TRAPPIST-1’s type has been found to have planets orbiting it, and there are thousands of other known stars of the same type.
A telescope in Chile made the discovery. The telescope examined 60 nearby dwarf stars in an attempt to find planets orbiting them.
Scientists call such objects “Goldilocks” planets because they’re just the right distance from their host star to make life a possibility.
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From the surface of the planets, he estimates that the star would appear around three to four times larger than the Sun appears to Earth. The two planets closest to TRAPPIST-1, however, might have day sides that are too hot and night sides too cold to host any life forms. Scientists haven’t completely charted the last planet’s orbit, but it could take from 4.5 to 72.8 days. Less is known about the third planet in the orbit, which receives twice the amount of radiation that earth does.
