How You – Yes, You – Can Help Find New Planets And More

Those seven planets are orbiting a dwarf star some 39 light-years – or 230 trillion miles – away.

“The very closest star to us – Proxima Centauri – has a ‘Super Earth, ‘ a little bit bigger than we are, orbiting within its eco-sphere 43 million light years away”, Wooten said. Moreover, scientists found the greatest number of habitable- zone-planet circling a single star.

Gillon and his team began to track Trappist-1 – a so-called “ultracool” dwarf star with less than 10 percent the mass of the Sun – with a dedicated telescope in 2010, and reported a year ago on three planets in its orbit.

“This, ” said Gillon, an astronomer, “is the most exciting discovery we’ve had with Spitzer in its nearly 14 years of operation”. You find tantalizing clues such as the existence of earth-like planets in neighboring galaxies, anomalous signals from the deep abyss of space, or possible evidence of microbial life on Mars. This proximity allows the researchers to study the planets in depth as well, gaining insight about planetary systems other than our own.

Picture this: If Trappist-1 were our sun, all seven planets would be inside Mercury’s orbit.

Now, the possibility of an alien life on the newly discovered exoplanets hinges on the assumption of Earth-like atmospheres. This technique has found thousands of extrasolar planets, but all the dimming starlight tells us is the size and orbits of the planets. Finding Earth-like planets around one of these stars means we likely have billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. The region around a star where water can exist in its liquid form is called the habitable zone. “In fact, with the right atmospheric conditions, there could be water on any of these planets”.

Gillon and his team used both ground and space telescopes to identify and track the seven Trappist-1 planets, which they label simply by lowercase letters, “b” through “h”.

It is estimated that Trappist-1 is half a billion years old while our sun is aged 4.5 billion years in comparison.

Added MIT scientist Julien De Wit: “This is of course incredible news if you consider we now know there is life elsewhere in the universe, and if you don’t consider the part where that life basically just trolled us”.

“Up to now, I don’t think we have had the right planets to find out”, he said in a press briefing.

Still to be learned is whether there is life on the planets, particularly the three Goldilocks ones.

The planets also are very close to each other.

Gillon and his colleagues have been interested in TRAPPIST-1 since late 2015.

The name TRAPPIST is an acronym for the “Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope“, which is located in Chile, but the name also reflects the exploration project’s Belgian roots by honoring Belgium’s famous Trappist beers, made by Trappist monks.