Nearby star hosts 7 ‘Earth’ planets
Scientists say newly discovered system could harbor water and life
A newfound solar system just 39 light-years away contains seven warm, rocky, Earthlike planets, scientists say.
The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, represents the first time astronomers have ever detected so many terrestrial planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying alien worlds and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth.
“Before this, if you wanted to study terrestrial planets, we had only four of them and they were all in our solar system,” said lead author Michaël Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium. “Now we have seven Earthsized planets to expand our un-
derstanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don’t, whatever we find will be super interesting.”
The newly discovered solar system resembles a scaled-down version of our own. The star at its center, an ultracool dwarf called TRAPPIST-1, is less than a tenth the size of the sun and about a quarter as warm. Its planets circle tightly around it; the closest takes just a day and a half to complete an orbit, the most distant takes about 20 days. If these planets orbited a larger, brighter star they’d be fried to a crisp. But TRAPPIST1 is so cool that all seven of the bodies are bathed in just the right amount of warmth to hold liquid water. And three of them receive the same amount of heat as Venus, Earth and Mars, putting them in “the habitable zone,” that Goldilocks region where it’s thought life can thrive.
Still, “Earthlike” is a generous term to describe these worlds. Though the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system resemble Earth in terms of size, mass, and the energy they receive from their star, there’s a lot that makes our planet livable beside being a warm rock. Further observation is required to figure out what the TRAPPIST-1 planets are made of, if they have atmospheres, and whether they hold water, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide — the molecules that scientists consider “biosignatures,” or signs of life.
“You can bet people will be rushing to take those measurements,” said Elisabeth Adams, an exoplanet researcher at the Planetary Science Institute who was not involved in the study. “That’s going to be fascinating to see.”
Whatever secrets it may harbor, the TRAPPIST-1 system will surely be a sight to behold. Though the star is small, its nearness to the planets means that, from their perspective, it appears about three times as large as our sun. The outermost planets enjoy the daily spectacle of their neighbors passing across the sky and in front of their shared sun, each world a large dark spot silhouetted against the salmon-colored star. Its dim glow, which skews toward the red and infrared end of the light spectrum, bathes the planets in warmth and paints their skies with the crimson hues of a perpetual sunset.
Gillon and his colleagues have been interested in TRAPPIST-1 since late 2015. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, they sensed small dips in the star’s brightness at regular intervals. These dips were caused by planets transiting — crossing between the star and Earth — and blocking some of its light. Last May, the scientists published their discovery in Nature: three rocky bodies, dubbed TRAPPIST-1b, -1c and -1d, orbited the small star, they said.
But right around the time the study was published, Gillon noticed that TRAPPIST-1d was behaving oddly. When he went to get a closer look with the Very Large Telescope, ESO’s gigantic observatory in the Atacama Desert, he realized that the dip in brightness he thought came from 1d was actually caused by three planets, all transiting at the same time.
This happens only once every three years, said Julien de Wit, a planetary scientist at MIT and a coauthor on the study. “The chance of catching it is less than one in a thousand,” he explained. “It’s funny because it’s such a huge paper with amazing results, and we got it from sheer luck.”
Next the team hurried to request time at the Spitzer Space Telescope, whose Earth-trailing orbit around the Sun offered an uninterrupted view of TRAPPIST-1 and its companions. During 20 days with the Spitzer telescope, the team witnessed 34 transits.
These observations “lifted the veil on the architecture of the system,” as de Wit put it. Instead of three, TRAPPIST-1 had seven planets, which were renamed TRAPPIST-1b through -h in order of their distance from the star.
The scientists determined that the six inner planets are locked in an orbital resonance, meaning that lengths of their orbits are related by a ratio of whole numbers. Because of this, the bodies exert regular gravitational influences on one another. By measuring those influences, the astronomers could determine the mass of the planets, something that is impossible to figure out from transiting data alone. That in turn allowed them to loosely calculate their densities — giving a sense of how much iron, rock, water and gas the bodies contain.
The fact the planets are in orbital resonance also suggests that they formed farther out from their sun and then migrated inward, Gillon said. This makes it more likely that they will contain water in some form, since water and other volatile compounds (molecules that readily turn to gas) tend to concentrate on the outer edges of solar systems.
Coincidentally, TRAPPIST-1 is located in the constellation Aquarius — the water bearer.
For years, evidence has accumulated that the Milky Way galaxy is full of Earthlike planets. The discovery of seven such worlds around a single, faint star suggests that they may be even more common than originally thought.
Gillon and his colleagues plan to seek out similar solar systems with a new project, Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultracool Stars, or SPECULOOS. (Like Trappist beer, speculoos cookies are a Belgian delicacy. His next effort will have to be called WAFFLES.)