Based on recent findings announced by astronomers back in May
2, 2016 prove that nearby brown dwarf stars are the most likely places to
discover extraterrestrial life?
By: Ringo Bones
A few days ago, astronomers have discovered not one, not
two, but three new Earth-like planets that may be the most promising places yet
to look for signs of alien or extraterrestrial life. What’s more, they don’t
circle a sun-like star and often referred to as “bizarre planets”. Instead,
these planets are all tightly orbiting what’s called a brown dwarf star in our
galactic backyard – just 40 light-years away. And these planets’ relatively
close proximity just lies within what our current astronomical instruments are
capable of chemically detecting via spectroscopic means when it comes to
detecting signs of extraterrestrial life.
As announced by astrophysicist and co-discoverer Michaël Gillon. an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium, whose team spotted the planetary triad using the Transiting Planets and
Planetesimals Small Telescope or TRAPPIST in La Silla, Chile. The planets orbit
a brown dwarf star previously known as 2MASS J230629228-0502285 that has since been dubbed TRAPPIST-1 as of May 2, 2016 named after the telescope that discovered it which is
under the administration of the European Southern Observatory, The star TRAPPIST-1
is roughly the size of the planet Jupiter and considerably smaller than our
sun. The star isn’t bright white like the sun. It is called a brown dwarf star
because it emits a lot of infrared light, which falls slightly outside the
range of what the human eye can see. And according to data collected by
astronomical instruments, TRAPPIST-1 isn’t quite technically a star – rather it’s
a big hot ball of gas that never got around to fusing hydrogen like most “normal
stars” do.
Standing on one of the planets surfaces and looking up would
be quite dramatic. “If we were there, we would see it as red and quite big in
the sky,” Gillon said. The “alien” sun would appear larger because the planets
are so much closer to their star than we are to ours, the red sun would also
appear much larger in the sky. It takes our Earth around 365 ¼ days to complete
its orbit our sun, for example, but the innermost of the newly discovered planets
of TRAPPIST-1 completes its orbit in just one and a half Earth days and the next closest in 2.6
Earth-days. Since the dwarf star is several thousand degrees Kelvin cooler than
our own sun, it is safe to assume that the star’s “Goldilocks Zone” is much
closer in comparison to our solar system.
The brown dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 is relatively pretty close
at 40 light-years away from the Earth and can be seen in the night sky in the
constellation of Aquarius. And as soon as the James Webb Space Telescope
becomes operational by 2018, the brown dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 will be one of the
top priority targets in order to find out if it certainly shows signs of extraterrestrial
biological activity.
