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Astronomers have confirmed the orbital period for the outermost known exoplanet orbiting TRAPPIST-1: TRAPPIST-1h:
Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope identified a regular pattern in the orbits of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system that confirmed suspected details about the orbit of its outermost and least understood planet, TRAPPIST-1h.
[...] Astronomers from the University of Washington have used data from the Kepler spacecraft to confirm that TRAPPIST-1h orbits its star every 19 days. At six million miles from its cool dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1h is located beyond the outer edge of the habitable zone, and is likely too cold for life as we know it. The amount of energy (per unit area) planet h receives from its star is comparable to what the dwarf planet Ceres, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, gets from our sun.
[...] The team calculated six possible resonant periods for planet h that would not disrupt the stability of the system, but only one was not ruled out by additional data. The other five possibilities could have been observed in the Spitzer and ground-based data collected by the TRAPPIST team.
[...] TRAPPIST-1's seven-planet chain of resonances established a record among known planetary systems, the previous holders being the systems Kepler-80 and Kepler-223, each with four resonant planets.
Previously: Three New Earth-Like Planets Discovered Around an Ultra Cool Red Dwarf
Seven Earth-Sized Exoplanets, Including Three Potentially Habitable, Identified Around TRAPPIST-1
Powerful Solar Flares Found at TRAPPIST-1 Could Dim Chances for Life
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:11PM (1 child)
The other day after I attempted to land on Yela in Star Citizen after flying through the asteroid belt between the moon and where quantum travel drops you off, I became sad as my ship was promptly destroyed since landing on small moons won't be supported until maybe mid-to-late July yet this year (heh). Anyway!
So I fired up Space Engine instead. The forum seems to be where all the mods are linked [spaceengine.org]. I loaded up an exoplanet pack by Pluton [spaceengine.org], set a course for TRAPPIST-1 in my Excelsior-class [wikia.com] ship of the imagination (courtesy of DoctorOfSpace's Mod Emporium [spaceengine.org]), brewed a nice cup of tea, earl gray, hot, and told Number One to engage, maximum warp. That was too damned slow, so I used my Q powers (vim) to upgrade my ship's warp engines.
(The .sss files for the ships [I think it's the .sss you need to edit, don't have it in front of me at the moment to verify] are very simple to understand for anybody who's ever looked at an INI-style file before. Simply drop the edited version back into the add-on's zip file and start Space Engine back up for the changes to take effect.)
Either that wasn't such a good idea or perhaps I'm not too good at piloting starships since I managed to crash that one smack dab into TRAPPIST-1d!
At any rate, I walked over to a mountain range, since Space Engine tends to generate those even though we don't know jack about the surface of these worlds, sped up time, and was fascinated to watch the planets go about their motion. TRAPPIST-1c and e were quite close, appearing to actually have a size (though of course not as big or bright as TRAPPIST-1 itself) from my vantage point.
Well anyway the point of this anecdote was to throw those links out. While Celestia doesn't try to be as flashy as Space Engine (gotta love the warp bubble effect), I also just checked The Celestia Motherlode [celestiamotherlode.net]. A mod for TRAPPIST-1 is available under the Stars section [celestiamotherlode.net].
Some day I hope people will go to import the latest mods for their favorite space simulator/planetarium and be able to get actual data about the compositions, geography, and atmospheres of those worlds.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:01PM
I have not used Space Engine with mods/updated data. I heard you can drop in new planets, imagery, and such, as well as higher resolution imagery. One pack is around 1 TB, I recall. I have no desire to fuck with all that so I'll just wait for main updates.
When Space Engine updates to beyond 0.9.8.0, we can expect to see the full TRAPPIST system (current version only has the 3 previously known planets, not the full 7), and some stunning imagery of Jupiter from JunoCam. Some of Saturn's moons have gotten much better imagery since Cassini approached them. Pan and Atlas specifically. There are also a number of newly discovered solar system dwarf planets, which might be interesting just to zoom out and see their crazy orbits in relation to other objects in the solar system. 2007 OR10 has a relatively large moon [soylentnews.org].
Upcoming 2020s ground telescopes such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope should be able to locate more KBOs / trans-Neptunian objects. If you look at lists of trans-Neptunian objects [wikipedia.org], you'll notice that while the aphelions can be extreme, the perihelions are relatively low. We have only detected the closest objects. One example is 2012 VP113: aphelion is 438 AU, perihelion is about 80.5 AU, and today it is around 83 AU away. Think of all of the undiscovered objects that are not so close to their perihelion, or have a more distant perihelion. Pluto, Mars, or Planet Nine sized objects await but are much further away.
Cassini's "death dives" through Saturn's rings will be interesting. I'm not sure how/if that can be reflected in Space Engine which just shows random simulated junk in planetary rings. (While searching for Cassini news, I also found this [thespacereporter.com].)
In early 2019, we will get JWST imagery which could change everything. I am really interested to see how well it can image distant objects where we will not be flying by anytime soon... Eris/Sedna/Quaoar/Makemake for example. If a Planet Nine is discovered in the next couple of years, JWST will be one of the best tools we have to locate and characterize moons around it. Also coming in early 2019... January 1, specifically... images of the next New Horizons target 2014 MU69 [wikipedia.org], which is small but significantly larger than comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. There are many crappy little rocks like 2014 MU69, but most of them won't get imaged in such detail as it will be until centuries later. If humanity survives long enough to do it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]