In the meantime, we just have our imaginations to fill in the gap. “For detailed characterization, we will need James Webb,” Triaud said. And from these observations, they feel fairly confident that the worlds are rocky. Right now, the astronomers are beginning to study the planets’ atmospheres with the telescopes they have. Today’s reveal adds four more to the mix. If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s because astronomers announced three potentially habitable planets around Trappist-1 in May. “We can expect that in a few years, we will know a lot more about these planets,” Amaury Triaud, another of the paper’s co-authors, said. If the atmospheres contain telltale gases like ozone, oxygen, or methane, life could exist there. The James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, will have the ability to measure the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres. “Maybe the most exciting thing here is that these seven planets are very well suited for detailed atmospheric study,” Gillon said. This illustration shows how NASA analyzes the planets as they orbit around the star. If the planets are too small, they’ll get washed out. This method makes it hard to find small, rocky worlds orbiting big, bright stars. When astronomers search for exoplanets, they typically look for a temporary dimming of a star - an indication that a planet has passed in front of it. The star’s dimness is actually what led to the discoveries of these planets. All the planets are believed to be rocky, and are all believed to be around the size of Earth, give or take 10 to 20 percent. The distance at which the planets orbit Trappist-1 is comparable to the distance of Jupiter to its moons. But its low mass allows its planets to orbit it very closely and remain in the habitable zone. It’s cool because it’s small: just about a tenth of the mass of our sun and about one-thousandth as bright. And it’s a solar system very different from our own.įor one, Trappist-1 is a tiny, “ultra-cool” dwarf star. The exoplanets orbit a star in the constellation Aquarius called Trappist-1. The planets “e,” “f,” and “g” - marked in green are directly in the “habitable zone” of this star system. One of them, Gillon said, has a mass “strongly to suggest a water-rich composition.” And it’s possible that the other four could have liquid water, too, depending on the composition of their atmospheres, the astronomers said. Three of the planets are directly in the star’s habitable zone, meaning water can mostly likely exist on the surface of them. “The seven planets … could have some liquid water and maybe life on the surface.” “It’s the first time that so many planets of this kind are found around a same star,” Michaël Gillon, the lead author of the Nature paper announcing the discovery, said in a press conference. That’s why an announcement today from NASA is so exciting: The space agency, along with partners around the world, has found seven potentially Earth-like planets orbiting a star 40 light-years away. The first step in finding life outside our own planet is to find a planet like our own: small, rocky, and at just the right distance from the star that liquid water could exist on its surface.
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