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NASA news conference tomorrow

The Trappist 1 system is only 41 light years away. Just a short stroll.

Maybe Drumpf is twittering questions as Mr Duck in his alt.right, news fake, mode.

Jack
 
A bit more about the discovery in the Guardian...

https://www.theguardian.com/science...d-planets-discovered-orbiting-trappist-1-star

I'm tempted to check the Daily Mail to see if there's a feature on the possibility of a new kind of alien emigrating to the UK, no doubt aliens hellbent on sucking the lifeblood from hard-working British families!

• Astronomers discover seven Earth-like planets orbiting distant star that's apparently small but cool
• Three planets thought to harbour life
• Aliens likely plotting as we speak

Joe
 
Missed the press conference but from the Guardian article I assume I guessed correctly :D

thebiglebowski said:
Could be related to this, Michael Gillon on the briefing list was part of the team to discover them:
Click to expand...

Astrophysicists from the University of Liege using the TRAPPIST telescope have discovered a planetary system formed of three Earth-sized planets around an « ultracool red dwarf star » slightly bigger than Jupiter in size. While these planets are close to their host star, they are not exposed to very high temperatures and could harbor areas on their surfaces that are suitable for life. The new planetary system is only 40 light years away from Earth. This proximity should allow the future generation of large telescopes to study the atmosphere of these planets with precision. As of today, these planets are the most promising candidates for having liquid water or even life outside the solar system. Even though the news has just been published in the journal Nature, it is probably a safe bet that teams of astrophysicists over the world will be tripping over each other to study this planetary system. In the meantime, the team that made the surprising discovery only has eyes for "its" small nearby star...
Click to expand...
 
Joe P said:
Iain,

Fascinating. Any speculation on the likelihood of life on any of the exoplanets?

Joe
Click to expand...

Well they are in the right place temperature wise. One issue might be that cool dwarf stars tend to have very strong "solar" flares which can have a nasty effect on higher life forms (although on the other hand, I suppose the flares may possible help catalyse the very early forms of life chemistry).

A nice thing about the star being so small/dim/cool is that the effect of the planets when they pass in front of the star is much larger than for a solar type star like our sun. This makes the "dip" in the light more pronounced, and so makes transmission spectroscopy for life markers easier. When we first started searching for exoplanets around 20 years ago, we tended to focus on stars like our sun (as at least we knew the sun had planets!) however the focus now has moved to these smaller stars, which seem to be even more "planet-infested".

There will be observations underway now looking at this.
 
Iain,

Now well out of date, but I still enjoy this XKCD comic.

exoplanets_large.png


This truly is a golden era -- I've always wanted to live during a golden era -- of exoplanetary discovery.

Joe
 
I know how important the "Goldilocks Zone" is with regards to liquid water, but isn't gravity at least as important in all of this? Or am I missing something here?

BBM
 
I assume the planets are in the same ballpark mass-wise as the Earth. Not sure what tolerance to significantly lower or higher gravity 'life' might have anyway?
 
I understand that for anything much beyond extremophile bacteria and the like to develop, a functional magnetic field is also probably necessary.
 
The Earth's magnetic field stops cosmic rays and the solar wind from ionising our atmosphere. Two of the four rocky planets (Earth and Mercury) in our solar system have magnetic fields and two don't, so they should probably be fairly common on Earth like planets.

So far no one has detected an exoplanet magnetic field, and I hadn't really thought if it was even possible to do so until you mentioned it. Of course (like most things!) it turns out some people have already thought about it and started to look for the radio emission that would be a signature of it...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01826
 
Has The Donald announced the wall (dyson sphere?) he's going to build to keep them out yet? Once they see how bigly wonderful he is, I'm sure the aliens will be rushing to pay for it... to keep us isolated.
 
This is neat, a NASA site that lets you explore these strange new worlds. The interactive animation below is of TRAPPIST-1d, the fourth planet in that system, in glorious 360º virtual reality.

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/trappist-1d-content/?layout=webvr&no_fullscreen=true&start_mode=3

Obviously, it's an artist's conception, but what is accurate is the apparent size and colour temperature of TRAPPIST-1, the dwarf star that Trappist-1d orbits, along with the little crescents, which are other planets in that system.

Here's the home page of the entire exoplanet site — https://exoplanets.nasa.gov

NASA is making America great. If this site existed when I was a kid I would have peed my pants.

Joe
 
joe.

how can we be sure these are god's creations and not just fake planets?


vuk.
 
What went wrong with AI?

How did we get from Robby

image.php


to Theresa May and the Donald?

Have they found the latter's home planet yet?
 
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