TRAPPIST-1: A Treasure Trove of Planets Found
Video Caption: Seven Earth-sized planets have been observed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope around a tiny, nearby, ultra-cool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1. Three of these planets are firmly in the habitable zone.
Over 21 days, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope measured the drop in light as each planet passed in front of the star. Spitzer was able to identify a total of seven rocky worlds, including three in the habitable zone, where liquid water might be found.
The video features interviews with Sean Carey, manager of the Spitzer Science Center, Caltech/IPAC; Nikole Lewis, James Webb Space Telescope project scientist, Space Telescope Science Institute; and Michaël Gillon, principal investigator, TRAPPIST, University of Liege, Belgium.
The system has been revealed through observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) telescope, as well as other ground-based observatories. The system was named for the TRAPPIST telescope.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at Caltech/IPAC. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit https://www.nasa.gov/spitzer and https://spitzer.caltech.edu.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
22 responses to “TRAPPIST-1: A Treasure Trove of Planets Found”
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Monty, I’ll take what’s behind planet #3.
Thought this Google gif says it all. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Oh dear Lord, the planets have gained sentience! 😀
If only if it were that easy. Cute though.
If they are just measuring drop in light, How do they know what zones they are in? frequency of orbit?
Basically, yes. Planets closer to a star will have a faster orbit, those further out have slower orbits, so the frequency of the transits can be directly correlated to orbital location.
Fascinating
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
kind of weird to think that it is possible for these planets to have life.
Not really, it’s a very young system. 800m years or so.
I hope the inhabitants of those planets have been observing and listening in to broadcasts of and from our planet over the past 100 years. Hopefully they will see that our species is dangerous, and that they have sent an extrastellar expedition armed with antimatter bombs to come and wipe us out and eliminate the cancerous threat of the human species from spreading to other worlds.
Well aren’t you a bundle of joy!
Perhaps we could persuade them to settle for a blockade.
Any system capable of interstellar travel of 40 lightyears in 100 years is capable of accelerating a pebble fast enough to kill Earth. Anti-matter is not required.
Quite!!
https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
Well I hope someone writes a good movie about traveling to this new System. It is my understanding that the star and system is way to young to support any kind of simple life yet alone intelligent life. So the story line should be about a multi generational space settlement mission of some kind. The movie could detail the title locked worlds and how we develop them. Would be cool to see how we might really bring mankind and our robot caretakers there.
You know, something really possible instead of magic sci-fi bull.
I wonder how human humans will be by the time we travel there. What will the ship or ships look like? Why would a group dare such an adventure? What will our developed Solar system look like at the time of their departure?
Seems Disney and NASAJPL already stole my idea lol https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
The rest of the universe screams “get your hot Jupiters”
leave it to one cat-lady of a red dwarf star to hoard all the Earth sized planets
If a species cracked the FTL problem.. these systems, I would think, would be the first to be colonized.
Or imagine the head start in astromony and the sciences not to mention the lower bar for interplanetary travel a native one would have enjoyed.
How would we build a vehicle that could approach the speed of light and really go there?
Project Orion