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When a planet was first discovered around an alien sun in 1995, it was big news. Now we know thousands of them, so it takes something special to get into the news. In February 2017 one team hit the jackpot: a star with seven Earth-sized planets, three of them in the habitable zone.

Ultra-cool Dwarf and the Seven Planets

Last edited by Mona - Astronomy; 06/26/17 09:11 PM.
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We cannot image the planets of Trappist-1, but here is an artist's imagined view of Trappist-1 c. One of its neighbors is transiting the star. A second one looks quite large in the sky, more like we'd see the Moon than our view of other planets. But the planets of Trappist-1 are close enough together that they would look large in the sky.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

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Here is a colorful image of TRAPPIST-1 e from an artist's imagination in the form of a travel poster. The other planets in the system look like moons in the sky. Forty light years isn't much in astronomical terms, but assuredly we won't be going to visit and check out the TRAPPIST-1 system any time soon. Remember: even light takes forty years to get there.

Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech

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Here is the TRAPPIST robotic telescope based at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. TRAPPIST (the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) is operated by the University of Liège in Belgium.

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Is there likely to be life on the TRAPPIST-1 planets? They are likely to be tidally locked to the star, i.e., as they orbit the same side always faces the Sun and the other side is in perpetual darkness. However if they have atmospheres that could prevent the extremes of temperature.

But how will we find out more about the temperatures of tidally-locked bodies? The James Webb Space Telescope is supposed be launched in October 2018. It will allow astronomers to study planetary atmospheres and help make sense of the idea of how life might develop without the day-and-night cycle that we're used to on Earth..

Quote:
As Dr. Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, notes while speaking to the Christian Science Monitor, we could liken this to conditions some creatures on our planet know well: the life aquatic. “If you think about life in the deep ocean,” Dr. Christiansen says, “it has evolved without a true diurnal cycle.”


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If you could stand on the surface of TRAPPIST-1f, what would you see? Of course, no Earthling knows what you'd see on TRAPPIST-1f. However this illustration is based on observational data from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

From the planet's surface, near the terminator between night and day, you might see water, ice and rock on the ground, with clouds above. Beyond the clouds the star TRAPPIST-1 would be redder than our Sun, but look larger because its planets are much closer to it than we are to the Sun. The other planets in this system would also appear more like the way we see the Moon than the way we see our own planet companions. They look more starlike to us.

Illustration Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Spitzer Team, T. Pyle (IPAC)

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A bit cooler even though closer. Does the sun as it cools have more or less gravitational pull on the planets?

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TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf, so it was born smaller than the Sun. A star's temperature is related to its mass, so red dwarfs are cooler than stars like the Sun. Solar System planets as close to the Sun as the TRAPPIST-1 planets are to their star would be way too hot for liquid water. All of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun.

The gravitational strength is based on mass and distance, but not temperature.

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This week the results of a new study of the TRAPPIST-1 planets was released by the European Southern Observatory.

It says that they're
Quote
all made mostly of rock, and some could potentially hold more water than Earth. The planets' densities, now known much more precisely than before, suggest that some of them could have up to 5 percent of their mass in the form of water — about 250 times more than Earth's oceans. The hotter planets closest to their parent star are likely to have dense steamy atmospheres and the more distant ones probably have icy surfaces. In terms of size, density and the amount of radiation it receives from its star, the fourth planet out is the most similar to Earth. It seems to be the rockiest planet of the seven, and has the potential to host liquid water.


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