Since the nearby system is just 40 light years away or 240 trillion Earth miles from our planet, scientists may soon be able to carry out in-depth study about these planets’ habitability. All three planets are in the habitable zone.
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Gillon and colleagues calibrated a 60-centimetre telescope in Chile, known as TRAPPIST, to track several dozen dwarf stars neither big nor hot enough to be visible with optical telescopes, AFP says. It is half the temperature of the sun and ten times smaller than it. It is barely red and is larger than planet Jupiter.
London- Raising the hope to find alien life near us, an global team of astrophysicists has discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting near the “habitable zone” of a dwarf star – the first planets ever discovered around such a tiny and dim star. Plus, the qualities of the dwarf star and its planets are intriguing.
In their report, published today in the journal Nature, the astronomers said all three planets are likely tidally locked to their dim star, with hemispheres of permanent night and day.
A Belgian-led team says it’s discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star less than 40 light-years away.
He called the discovery a paradigm shift in the search for life elsewhere in the universe. “We have already shown that these types of stars are the way to find Earth-like planets”.
Despite the closer orbits, the two innermost stars receive just four and two times the amount of radiation compared to what the Earth receives from the sun.
Scientists believe that these planets may be key targets for observation in their search for life on other planets.
“The structure of this planetary system is much more similar in scale to the system of Jupiter’s moons than to that of the solar system”, he noted. But after applying her model to this newfound system, she found that the third planet, TRAPPIST 1-d, may have clung to much of its surface water.
“These planets are so close, and their star so small, we can study their atmosphere and composition, and further down the road, which is within our generation, assess if they are actually inhabited”, said Julien de Wit as quoted by MIT News.
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The third, outer, planet’s orbit is not yet well known but it probably receives less radiation than the Earth does, but maybe still enough to lie within the habitable zone. He added, “All of these things are achievable, and within reach now”. Future observatories, including NASA’s James Web Space Telescope set to launch in 2018, should unearth even more details.
