Just a few hour ago, NASA revealed they have found seven Earth-like planets just 40 light years away in a habitable zone. Some might even be water-rich and habitable for life. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered not one, but seven Earth-like planets and they’re all orbiting a single star.
What makes the discovery all the more astonishing is that not only is the system just 40 light years away from Earth, but that three of the planets discovered are within what we would call the ‘habitable zone’.Speaking about the discovery Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington said: “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.
But there is a big problem with this announcement: We already know much more than this, including that life exists outside of Earth.
“It’s the first time that so many planets of this kind are found around a same star,” Michaël Gillon, the lead author of the Nature paper announcing the discovery, said in a press conference. “The seven planets … could have some liquid water and maybe life on the surface.”The seven exoplanets orbit a star in the constellation Aquarius called Trappist-1. And it’s a solar system said to differ greatly from our own.
Their sun, or ‘star’, has scientists fascinated because it is much smaller than our own, with an estimated one-tenth the mass of our sun and about one-thousandth its brightness. The good news for potential life on those planets is that the star’s low mass allows its planets to orbit it very closely and remain in the habitable zone.
What makes TRAPPIST-1 special is its star. It is what is known as an ultra-cool dwarf which means that planets can be extremely close and yet still feature liquid water on their surface. In fact all seven of them are closer to their star than Mercury is to our own.
In addition they’re incredibly close to one another which means that you could be standing on one planet, look up into the sky and actually make out the cloud formations on a neighbouring planet.
”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.”
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