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posted by on Thursday February 23 2017, @01:34PM   Printer-friendly
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)


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 24 2017, @01:22AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday February 24 2017, @01:22AM (#470982) Journal

    The James Webb Space Telescope can study it in 2019.

    NASA research has led to medical advances. NASA has an annual publication showing off benefits of their research called Spinoff [nasa.gov].

    A small amount of resources is spent on space travel. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty and into the middle class in recent decades. Starvation is not a problem of lacking food right now, it's a problem of distributing food, usually in places undergoing a war. If you want to fix starvation, have fun fixing places like Syria or South Sudan. NASA researches energy technologies and sees obvious benefits from improved solar and practical nuclear fusion. Medical care/research has loads of money thrown into it already, but we'll see a huge decline in costs once preventative regenerative medicine takes off.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @04:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @04:58AM (#471014)

    It surreal to see a crowd saying 'India should stick to cleaning latrines before trying space tech' turn into 'USA should stick to solving real world problems before trying space tech' in less than a decade.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 24 2017, @05:46AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday February 24 2017, @05:46AM (#471017) Journal

      And which crowd is that? The ACs flinging their own poo at NASA have a fairly ephemeral sense of community by nature and don't represent the majority opinion here.

      On the (3 comment) Indian space mission article, nobody said that India should not operate a space program. ISRO has done its work on the cheap, and its Mars mission was successful on the first attempt.

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