![]() “For the first time ever, we don’t have to speculate. “The Trappist-1 planets make the search for life in the galaxy imminent,” said Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not a member of the research team. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch next year, will peer at the infrared wavelengths of light, ideal for studying Trappist-1.Ĭomparisons among the different conditions of the seven will also be revealing. Telescopes on the ground now and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit will be able to discern some of the molecules in the planetary atmospheres. “Are we alone out there? We’re making a step forward with this - a leap forward, in fact - towards answering that question.” “You can just imagine how many worlds are out there that have a shot to becoming a habitable ecosystem,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a NASA news conference on Wednesday. “Here, if life managed to thrive and releases gases similar to that we have on Earth, then we will know.”Ĭool red dwarfs are the most common type of star, so astronomers are likely to find more planetary systems like that around Trappist-1 in the coming years. Triaud, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge in England and another member of the research team. “I think that we have made a crucial step toward finding if there is life out there,” said Amaury H. Scientists could even discover compelling evidence of aliens. “This is the first time so many planets of this kind are found around the same star,” Michael Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium and the leader of an international team that has been observing Trappist-1, said during a telephone news conference organized by the journal Nature, which published the findings on Wednesday. One or more of the exoplanets in this new system could be at the right temperature to be awash in oceans of water, astronomers said, based on the distance of the planets from the dwarf star. That is quite close in cosmic terms, and by happy accident, the orientation of the orbits of the seven planets allows them to be studied in great detail. The planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1, about 40 light-years, or 235 trillion miles, from Earth. ![]() Not just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to search for signs of alien life outside the solar system.
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