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from the tentatively-named-Doc-Grumpy-Happy-Sleepy-Bashful-Sneezy-and-Dopey dept.
Astronomers have observed enough planetary transits to confirm the existence of seven "Earth-sized" exoplanets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, an ultra-cool (~2550 K) red dwarf star about 39.5 light years away. Three of the exoplanets are located inside the "habitable zone" of their parent star. These three orbit from 0.028 to 0.045 AU away from the star:
Astronomers using the TRAPPIST–South telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as other telescopes around the world, have now confirmed the existence of at least seven small planets orbiting the cool red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. All the planets, labelled TRAPPIST-1b, c, d, e, f, g and h in order of increasing distance from their parent star, have sizes similar to Earth.
The exoplanets are presumed to be tidally locked. The six closest to TRAPPIST-1 have been determined to be rocky, while the seventh, TRAPPIST-1h, requires additional observations to determine its characteristics due to its longer orbital period.
Mass estimates for the planets range from 0.41 Earth masses (M⊕) to 1.38 M⊕. Radii range from 0.76 Earth radii (R⊕) to 1.13 R⊕.
Spitzer, Hubble, and other telescopes will continue to make observations of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, but the best data will likely come from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled to launch in late 2018. JWST will allow the atmospheres and temperatures of many exoplanets to be characterized, which will help to settle whether the "habitable zones" of red dwarf stars are actually hospitable.
Artist illustrations and data for the TRAPPIST-1 system compared to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth.
Here's a website dedicated to the star.
Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 (DOI: 10.1038/nature21360) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:25PM
GP here. I was being too cynical. I'm enjoying a nice cup of tea, earl grey, hot right now. I agree that the "artist renditions" are completely useless. I was looking at one and thought, "You've painted an Arctic iceberg with three moon-like objects in the sky instead of one. Yay."
There are two primary things that have me quite excited at this. Maybe, if I may be optimistic this time instead of cynical.
First, three of those planets are in the habitable zone. Those are workable odds for life that may even have a chance of evolving to some complexity (and might we hope intelligence) on at least one of those planets. iirc the local system here also has three planets in the habitable zone.
Second, it's only 40 ly away. That's very accessible compared to many other places. Sure there's the Star Trek fantasy of sending people out there and various other scenarios involving hibernation or what-have-you. In reality, even a robotic probe would probably be out of the question since there's no way we know of right now to even get something to 0.1c. Clearly we can't do much with it as far as actually going there is concerned, but on the off chance that on one of those planets there is intelligent life....
My main doubt about humans ever being able to make meaningful contact with another intelligent species are the time-distances involved. I have no confidence that humanity would be capable of sending a signal to a good-looking planet say 400 ly away and still having a civilization in power capable of receiving a reply at least 800 years in the future. (That also assumes that at exactly 400 years from now, there's a civilization in power on one of those planets that's also capable of receiving and interpreting this signal and replying.) Add in some fudge factors and a project like that would need to last centuries.
Being 40 ly away, assuming there is an intelligent technological civilization over there, means that it may be possible to actually contact them, receive a reply, and maybe have a couple more good rounds within the average life expectancy of a human civilization (which I guesstimate at about 300-400 years before collapse depending on how you measure things).
tl;dr I see good reasons to be excited here even if we can't physically go there. Maybe there's no intelligent life there. Who knows. But, and I'll be dead before physics would permit me to ever know, if....
(P.S. Didn't explain in my post above but I would like to propose that if there is intelligent life out there, we call them Trappers. It's simple and catchy.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:25PM
> (That also assumes that at exactly 400 years from now, there's a civilization in power on one of those planets that's also capable of receiving and interpreting this signal and replying.
One of the quirks of the vastness of cosmological time, is that if we find intelligent life out there capable of receiving our signals, it will almost certainly be REALLY intelligent life. It's simple statistics:
Current estimates date the first ever homo sapiens to about 200000 years ago, give or take a Tuesday afternoon or two. We only developed the technology to detect and decode radio signals in the last hundred years, hundred and fifty if you're feeling generous. In other words, for over 99.9% of our time on Earth, this planet has been uninhabitted as far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned.
Of course, that's just the past. Human history extends into the future as well (we hope). Possibly far into the future. Let's assume that if we don't somehow extinct ourselves / knock ourselves back into the iron age in the next couple hundred years, we will master all kinds of exciting new technologies (clean energy, closed loop recycling, advanced robotics, AI, space travel / colonisation, brain uploads, GNU-Hurd, whatever) that enable the sustainable, long-term survival of our civilisation into the indefinite future. In that case, you end up with a civilisational timeline that looks a bit like this, but even more exaggerated:
{---------------------200000 years Banging rocks together--------------------}{*}{-------------------------------------Many many of centuries of post-scarcity utopian sc-fi future-------------------------------}
Where the {*} represents the measly couple of hundred of years we currently inhabit, the period in which humanity raises itself up from a squabbling pre-industrial agrarian society to a persistent global / interplanetary civilisation. Pick a point at random on that line and 99.999% of the time and you are going to either encounter pre-industrial societies (no response from SETI signals, but keep an eye on them) or superadvanced Vorlons / Culture ("Oh hai, welcome to the galactic community"). The chances of finding a bunch of early-industrial Victorians or facebook-obsessed millenials at a comparable level of development to 2016 humanity is vanishingly small.
Flipping this around then, and coming back parent's post: Assuming that civilisations on other planets develop like ours[1], we can be reasonably confident that any response to our SETI signals will almost certainly be from a civilisation that can wait 400 years for a reply.
[1] Yeah it's a big assumption, but like all this SETI and exoplanet stuff, we can only work with what we know, and all we know about Life right now is based on a datapoint of exactly One life-sustaining planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:43PM
we will master all kinds of exciting new technologies
We won't be more intelligent for having done so. More knowledgeable, yes.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:52PM
> for over 99.9% of our time on Earth, this planet has been uninhabitted as far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned.
Technocentric mindset, man. The Aliens, man, they can feel our auras, man. We radiate crummy Karma like crazy, man. That's why they're hiding from us, and you need another puff to commune with them, man.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:57PM
The TRAPPIST-1 system might be a poor choice to look for intelligent life because the star is "at least 500 million years old". That line from Wikipedia seems to be based on this paper [arxiv.org]. I guess that is based on the low temperature of the "ultra-cool" red dwarfs requiring at the least 500 million years of cooling, so there is no upper bound on the age given. 500 million years is about as long as it supposedly took for life to form/seed on Earth (I believe the date has been pushed a bit earlier by recent research).
The good news is that the James Webb Space Telescope should be able to give us more clarity about this system in just 2 years or so. It will launch in late 2018, and observations of this system will be a part of the "first wave" or whatever they're calling it. Throw in a few months to analyze the results and publish, and I'd expect to see JWST atmospheric data in mid-late 2019. Before that, there will be additional observations using Spitzer and increased interest in the system at observatories around the world.
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