Even since its discovery a year ago, the red dwarf / brown dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 is now believed to not contain one but seven Earth-like planets, does this make it more likely that this star system harbors Earth-like life?
By: Ringo Bones
The most promising spot to look for Earth-like extraterrestrial
life in our Milky Way galaxy just got more promising after it was found out
that it not just contain three Earth-like planets but seven. The star is named
after the team or astronomers manning the European Southern Observatory’s Transiting
Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, or TRAPPIST, who discovered a small
dim red dwarf star about 39 light-years away last year. After other “more
capable” astronomical telescopes were trained into the TRAPPIST star system,
like the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s (fortunately
Fake President Trump hasn’t yet made an Executive Order to disestablish NASA
despite The White House is now currently overrun by the U.S. Republican Party
Jesus Cult) Spitzer Space Telescope had uncovered new features of the star
system that the team of astronomers led by Michaël Gillon of the STAR Institute
at the University of Liège in Belgium published their findings in the science
journal Nature a few days ago confirming that the TRAPPIST-1 star system has
not three but seven Earth-sized planets, six of which are likely rocky, and all
seven could possibly support liquid water.
Basing on the very recent discovered data, the TRAPPIST-1
star system looks very different from our own Solar System. The planets pass
very close to each other as they orbit that according to NASA astronomers: “If
a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and
potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring words, which would
sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.” From this description
alone, standing of one of TRAPPIST-1’s planets would be reminiscent of going to
those “comic book” and “movie” planets as portrayed by their illustrators and
set makers in those classic Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon movies and comics.
Even though TRAPPIST-1 is a “mere” 39 light-years away which
would put it right next door in cosmic terms – the planets might just have been
on the other side of the cosmos from our perspective because using our current
rocket technology, a spacecraft launched from Earth could only reach TRAPPIST-1
star system after 700,000 years. Given how far it is, a 595 mile-per-hour passenger
jet airliner takes about 44-million years to reach it – if it could escape the
Earth’s and our Solar System’s gravity. And the radio wave telemetry sent by a
space-probe on one of TRAPPIST-1’s planets – travelling at the speed of light -
would take 39 years to reach to NASA’s Mission Control Center.
