NASA teases a major new exoplanet discovery

Other gas planets in our solar system have large moons in almost circular orbits, so some astronomers speculated that a small star like TRAPPIST-1 might have Earth-sized planets orbiting close to the star.

NASA is about to go live with an announcement about a big “beyond our Solar System” discovery. Described as a “hot super Earth with a rocky surface”, Gliese 411b is located in the fourth-nearest star system to the Sun, making it the third-nearest planetary system to the Sun, according to the U.K.’s University of Hertfordshire, which participated in the research. “The seven planets are temperate”.

At just 39 light years away, TRAPPIST-1 and its seven planets will be visible, and JWST will allow astronomers to analyse these worlds’ atmospheres. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launches this year and will search for planets around 200,000 or so bright stars. The great infrared observatory has also made it possible to determine the temperatures, winds, and atmospheric compositions on these distant planets’.

This artist’s impression shows the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. “Now we have seven more that we can study in detail”, Gillon said. “Oxygen itself is not enough”.

Exoplanets have always been under discussion but the first ones discovered were Jupiter-like gas giants orbiting stars.

Amaury Triaud, another author on the study, explained: “The first stage we are doing is a reconnaissance stage to rule out the planets that have a large hydrogen envelope”.

In so doing, we stand to learn a lot about exoplanets, a lot about Earth, and a lot about our place in the universe. This is an artist’s rendition of what the fifth planet in this freakish solar system might look like.

About a year ago, however, scientists announced that they’d found three planets around this star. Because the planets are so close together, they’d appear in the sky like moons. For instance, in our solar system Venus and Mars are in the habitable zone, but both are fairly inhospitable in our present time.

Earth’s seven sisters and its potential inhabitants will still be there when we are long gone. In a companion article in Nature, he said Gillon’s team could have been lucky in nabbing so many terrestrial planets in one stellar swoop.

And that’s just the beginning.