NASA Finds Solar System With Seven Habitable Exoplanets

For the the first time in recorded history, there are new kids on the block- seven of them in fact, just 40 light-years away. All huddled together around a single star, these exoplanets are just waiting to be under the spotlight. And indeed they did under NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

This neighboring system is called the TRAPPIST-1, named after The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) found in Chile. TRAPPIST-1 is also the name of the star the seven exoplanets orbit around in. It seems that this entire system is a bundle of purely earth-like potentially habitable planets.

With Spitzer, researchers were able to measure the sizes of these exoplanets and developed estimates of their density. In their calculation of the density, all planets were determined as ‘rocky’ and were able to contain liquid water. It’s starting to sound more like Earth, doesn’t it? Well, according to NASA’s observations, the first three planets closest to the star are inside the habitable zone.

Exoplanet System’s Trappist-1 Vs Our Sun

In contrast with the Solar System, TRAPPIST-1’s planets are much closer to each other. In fact, they are so close that NASA says “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 worlds which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in earth’s sky.”

Another disparity is that TRAPPIST-1 (the star) is an ultra-cool dwarf. This means that it is so cold, that planets that are near the sun could still contain liquid water. Our sun is a G2V yellow dwarf-type star, which is warmer than the former. So planets close to the sun like Mercury and Venus cannot contain water.

In Spitzer’s 14 years of operation, it has shared astonishing scenes of space that world has ogled at. With this instrument, scientists have greater chances in their pursuit to reveal conditions in space that are suitable for life. NASA has an upcoming project this 2018 with the James Webb Space Telescope. The agency aims to further observe the state of these neighboring exoplanets by analyzing temperature and surface pressures, detecting chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone and other components of a planet’s atmosphere. With the help of Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler, the Earth might just confirm habitability in an entire system of planets and not just one planet- with new friends? We are about to know.

Click here to watch scientists speak more about TRAPPIST.