TRAPPIST-1 Has Seven Earth Like Planets?

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.

Nearby Brown Dwarf Stars: The Most Promising Home of Extraterrestrial Life?

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.