Three of these planets are in a habitable zone which means not too close and not too far from the sun-like star. The announcement of this discovery was met with great excitement. NASA announced on Wednesday its Spitzer telescope revealed the presence of seven planets nearby that could support life.
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These planets, being outside the Solar System, are termed exoplanets. Astronomers discovered seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a star named Trappist-1.
The planets are so close to each other and the star that there are seven of them within a space five times smaller than the distance from Mercury to our sun.
The exoplanets discovered are part of what astronomers are calling the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system.
The planets also are very close to each other. For example, they concluded that at least six of them are Earth-size and rocky. Study of the system, known as Trappist-1, promises answers to a lot of questions about life on other planets-and it’s likely all your friends have been able to talk about. The discovery of seven such worlds around a single, faint star suggests that they may be even more common than originally thought. These kind of stars are not very bright and emit energy mostly in the infrared. Only two of the planets there are in the “habitable zone”.
Life would be quite a bit different on those planets. As a result, only one side faces the star.
“So we requested time with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope”, said co-author Emmanuel Jehin, also at the University of Liege. But just because a planet is in this sweet spot, doesn’t mean life exists or ever did. The discovery of these planets is of extreme importance and will go a long way in solving some of the mysteries of planet formation. Well, more like 40 light years ahead of us. Because, TRAPPIST-1 is relatively near to the earth. It is just 500 million years old.
“In the future we want to directly image earth-like planets”, he said. But it already shows just how many Earth-size planets could be out there – especially in a star’s sweet spot, ripe for extraterrestrial life.
The findings of scientists about TRAPPIST-1 appear in the journal Nature. Further observation is required to figure out what the TRAPPIST-1 planets are made of, if they have atmospheres, and whether they hold water, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide – the molecules that scientists consider “biosignatures”, or signs of life. The star, a variant called as an ultra-cool dwarf star, is approximately 40 light-years or about 378 trillion kilometers from planet Earth. “The goal of this is to find new worlds that we can study with future telescopes like JWST. We don’t care. They’re stupid planets and we never liked them anyway”.
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The Trappist-1 poster is the latest in a series of Nasa space travel posters to promote exoplanet science.
