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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

TRAPPIST-1 [wikipedia.org] was known to be at least 500 million years old. Now astronomers estimate it to be between 5.4 and 9.8 billion years old [nasa.gov]:

Scientists now have a good estimate for the age of one of the most intriguing planetary systems discovered to date– TRAPPIST-1, a system of seven Earth-size worlds orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star about 40 light-years away. Researchers say in a new study that the TRAPPIST-1 star is quite old: between 5.4 and 9.8 billion years. This is up to twice as old as our own solar system, which formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

[...] At the time of its discovery, scientists believed the TRAPPIST-1 system had to be at least 500 million years old, since it takes stars of TRAPPIST-1's low mass (roughly 8 percent that of the Sun) roughly that long to contract to its minimum size, just a bit larger than the planet Jupiter. However, even this lower age limit was uncertain; in theory, the star could be almost as old as the universe itself. Are the orbits of this compact system of planets stable? Might life have enough time to evolve on any of these worlds?

Previously: Seven Earth-Sized Exoplanets, Including Three Potentially Habitable, Identified Around TRAPPIST-1 [soylentnews.org]
TRAPPIST-1h Orbital Details Confirmed [soylentnews.org]

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