WANT TO GET AWAY?
Scientists find 7 ‘new Earths’ — and only 12 parsecs from us!
Book your vacation now to TRAPPIST-1a — a red dwarf star 40 light years away where astronomers have found seven “Earth-like” planets — some of which could support life.
The search for extraterrestrial life just got a boost with the discovery of seven Earth-like planets in our galactic backyard.
The exoplanets — so-called because they are beyond our solar system — orbit a dim dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1a, roughly the size of Jupiter, in the constellation Aquarius, scientists announced Wednesday.
The newfound worlds are less than 40 light-years away — a cosmic hop in our 100,000-light-year-- wide Milky Way — and could yield clues about alien life, astronomers said.
Three are in the Goldilocks Zone, the habitable region around a star where conditions are just right for a planet to have water, and possibly life, according to NASA and a Belgian-led research team.
The smallest of the planets is 75 percent the size of Earth, while the largest is just 10 percent bigger than our planet. They occupy tight orbits of between 1.5 to 20 days, all lying closer to TRAPPIST-1a than Mercury does to our sun. And TRAPPIST-1a is less than one-tenth the size of our sun, and a quarter as warm. The findings set a new record for the greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside the solar system, according to NASA. “This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments — places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “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.” Scientists said they need to study each exoplanet’s atmosphere in search of chemical signatures of biological activity to determine whether the worlds may harbor life. Using telescopes that can detect the presence of oxygen, methane and carbon dioxide, perhaps astronomers could find “at least one combination of molecules, if present with relative abundance, that would tell us there is life with 99 percent confidence,” said the lead researcher, Professor Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium.
Last spring, Gillon and his team reported finding three planets around TRAPPIST-1a. Now that the count is now up to seven, Gillon says there could be many more.
Astronomers have traditionally focused their search for exoplanets around larger, sun-like stars, which they would monitor for telltale changes in the amount of light
emanating from them.
But they hit pay dirt by focusing instead on TRAPPIST-1a, an ultracool, dim dwarf star.
“The great idea of this approach was to study planets around the smallest stars of the galaxy — and close to us,” said Gillon. “That is something nobody did before us. Most astronomers were focused on stars like our sun.”
Study co-author Amaury Triaud, a scientist at the University of Cambridge in England, said the discovery marks a “crucial step” in finding life beyond Earth.
“Up to now, I don’t think we have had the right planets . . . Now we have the right target,” he said.
In several billion years, when our sun has run out of fuel and the solar system has ceased to exist, TRAPPIST-1a will still be an infant star, astronomer Ignas Snellen, with the Netherlands’ Leiden Observatory, wrote in a related essay in the journal Nature.
“It burns hydrogen so slowly that it will live for another 10 trillion years,” he wrote, “which is arguably enough time for life to evolve.”