NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.
The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water — key to life as we know it — under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

Michaël Gillon, Amaury H. M. J. Triaud, Brice-Olivier Demory, Emmanuël Jehin, Eric Agol, Katherine M. Deck, Susan M. Lederer, Julien de Wit, Artem Burdanov, James G. Ingalls, Emeline Bolmont, Jeremy Leconte, Sean N. Raymond, Franck Selsis, Martin Turbet, Khalid Barkaoui, Adam Burgasser, Matthew R. Burleigh, Sean J. Carey, Aleksander Chaushev, Chris M. Copperwheat, Laetitia Delrez, Catarina S. Fernandes, Daniel L. Holdsworth, Enrico J. Kotze, Valérie Van Grootel, Yaseen Almleaky, Zouhair Benkhaldoun, Pierre Magain, Didier Queloz. Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. Nature, 2017; 542 (7642): 456 DOI: 10.1038/nature21360

At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets.
This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system. Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

“This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.”

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them, allowing their density to be estimated. Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. 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. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated — scientists believe it could be an icy, “snowball-like” world, but further observations are needed.
In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star — classified as an ultra-cool dwarf — is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun. The planets also are very close to each other. If a person were standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.

A Few More Details: TRAPPIST-1 is 8% the mass of and 11% the radius of the Sun. It has a temperature of 2550 K (Kelvin) and is at least 500 million years old. In comparison, the Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and has a temperature of 5778 K.

Owing to its mass, the star has the ability to live for up to 4–5 trillion years, meaning that TRAPPIST-1 may remain a main sequence star when the Universe is much older than it is now, and when the gas needed to make stars will have been used up. The star is metal-rich, with a metallicity ([Fe/H]) of 0.04, or 109% the solar amount. This is particularly odd as such low-mass stars near the boundary between brown dwarfs and hydrogen-fusing stars are expected to have considerably less metallic composition than the Sun. Its luminosity is 0.04% of that of the Sun.

The planets may also be tidally locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong winds blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.
Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. In the fall of 2016, Spitzer observed TRAPPIST-1 nearly continuously for 500 hours. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing — transits — of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system. Engineers optimized Spitzer’s ability to observe transiting planets during Spitzer’s “warm mission,” which began after the spacecraft’s coolant ran out as planned after the first five years of operations.

“This is the most exciting result I have seen in the 14 years of Spitzer operations,” said Sean Carey, manager of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. “Spitzer will follow up in the fall to further refine our understanding of these planets so that the James Webb Space Telescope can follow up. More observations of the system are sure to reveal more secrets.”

However interesting these planets are, the distance (close in astronomical terms) is thousands of years distant for even the most (realistic) futuristic projections for spacecraft.

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14 COMMENTS

  1. COMING SOON TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU: TRAPPIST -1 "BOOM-BOOM-BOOM”

    Just when you thought you were all alone, terror strikes as the exoplanetarians drop through the atmosphere like black silhouettes with only one mission in mind: EXTERMINATION. Aided only by the notorious, psychopathic, underground villain, 'Spitzer' who plans to rule the seven planets and take over Earth by destroying its inhabitants with icy “snowball like” grenades and putting his side kick to good use- the one they call the poisonous, ultra cool dwarf…..

    Ok, I’ll get back on the meds…

  2. The alternative scenario is that Ming the Merciless is ruling the 7 planets and the only one who can stop him is Buck Rogers as life imitates art.

  3. That 40 light year distance is nothing. Just find a worm hole, step through it and badda bing, badda boom. We could be there before the mid term elections.

  5. Send a rocket full of democrats, colonize the natives to the point where they are all dependent on government subsidies and thus create whole new worlds of slave voters.

  6. We know that the Democrat caucus would go for it. Send an all black crew so that opposing the mission would be racist. Add a few women so opposing it would also be sexist – some trannys for good measure and to insure political correctness.

  7. It sounds as though you're not convinced. When we receive video from Trappist 1-C, of plump lesbians wearing comfortable shoes, holding their cats and doing a liturgical dance, it will confirm your present concerns.

  10. In truth, I am at a loss as to justify the kinds of resources we are throwing at these exo-planets. There have been millions of dollars of telescope time trained on these distant rocks for 6 months or so, and another several million dollar effort is underway to get another telescope in orbit to get a feel as to whether there is atmosphere on the three most promising rocks, and if so what it consists of.

    Let's assume we find out all about this stuff. Then what? We won't have the technology to do anything about it for another 1000 years or so, and we have flushed millions and millions of dollars into this irrelevant knowledge that could have been sent to Democrat districts instead, and THEY could have flushed those dollars down a rat hole in the here and now.

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