"Gold has many sisters," Dr. Sarah Seeger, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said at a news conference Wednesday. Scientists who will use all the most advanced equipment on Earth and in space will study the seven planets as well as about a thousand stars of a type similar to the sun of those planets - extremely cold red dwarfs
This week's NASA discovery of seven Earth-sized worlds The holidays around relatively nearby stars could be a watershed in humanity's search for extraterrestrial life, scientists say.
As a reminder, on Wednesday (February 22), an international team of astronomers announced that seven Earth-sized planets were discovered around TRAPPIST-1, a tiny, cold star located 39 light-years from Earth. Three of these planets surround the star in the "habitable zone", where lakes, rivers and oceans can exist on the planet's surface in a liquid state, if the atmosphere allows it.
"With this discovery, we have taken a huge, accelerated step forward in the search for habitable worlds, as well as potential life on other worlds," said Dr. Sarah Seeger, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during a press conference Wednesday.
The find is exciting for several reasons, according to Seeger, who is not part of the discovery team. First of all, when there are so many potential worlds, the TRAPPIST-1 system is a promising candidate for the existence of life even if researchers do not have a precise understanding of its life zone (a term also known as the "Golden Zone" after the heroine of the children's story Zhavea and the Three Bears). "Zhava has many sisters". Cigar said.
Furthermore, about 15 percent of the nearest stars to the solar system are extremely cold red dwarfs, which are only slightly larger than the size of the planet Jupiter. If TRAPPIST-1 is a representative example, most red dwarfs may host rocky planets with the potential for life.
"Thanks to this amazing discovery, we know that there must be a much greater potential for life on the worlds out there, just waiting to be found," Seeger said.
Discovering these worlds is just the beginning. TRAPPIST-1 is close enough to Earth that astronomers will soon be able to characterize in detail the atmospheres of the seven planets and look for potential signs of life in them, including oxygen, ozone, methane and other gases, and indeed the James Webb Space Telescope should make this possible after its launch in late 2018. Nicole Lewis , an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore intends to use the Hubble Space Telescope to begin studying the atmospheres of the two planets in this system whose discoveries were already confirmed in 2016 (and this week the remaining five planets were added to them).
Three huge ground-based observatories are also due to start operating by the middle of the aid years - the Very Large Telescope of Europe and the Giant Magellan Telescope (both in Chile) and the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii - the builders of these telescopes said that they will be able to study the atmospheres of planets in nearby solar systems such as TRAPPIST-1.
The research team that discovered the planets around TRAPPIST-1 will soon begin the hunt for thousands of such planets around about a thousand extremely cold red dwarfs in a project known as SPECULOOS and in 2018 NASA plans to launch the TESS spacecraft (which will scan the sky for planets passing in front of their star.
More of the topic in Hayadan:
- A terrestrial planet has been discovered around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System
- Is there life on the nearest planet, Proxima Centauri b?
- Life at the seam between the bright side and the dark side: the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to examine the composition of the atmosphere of Proxima Centauri b
- The search for a second Earth
- NASA Announces 1,284 New Extrasolar Planets - Largest Harvest to Date
6 תגובות
This is exactly what I needed!!!
I have to explain to people who read a book from the 12th century to get into the concept that existed for 1500 years according to which the earth is in the center and is fixed (it does not move and does not rotate around itself) and the sun surrounds it and like it the entire star system.
That people will understand that what we are sure of due to a tradition of hundreds of years can one day prove to be a mistake.
Excited to no end!!!
Mary
A.
It's called the "intermediate value theorem" 🙂
If a star has a very hot side and a very cold side, there must also be a place in the middle with an average temperature or there is a good heat transfer and the whole star is balanced. In any case, it cannot be that there is no middle ground at all
Instead of Goldilocks we got Multilock?
to the destination,
The fact that they are gravitationally locked does not rule out the possibility of life existing on them. If they have an atmosphere, the heat and cold on both sides of the planet will be balanced by the movement of air from the hot side to the cold side and back again, God forbid.
As far as I know, the seasons in AZ are caused by the inclination of AZ relative to the plane of the Sun's orbit. We do not know what the inclination of the planets is, and it is doubtful that we have the ability to find out. In addition, because the planets are gravitationally locked, atmospheric phenomena are probably manifested in a different way than in the Earth.
In addition, it is possible that there are planets that are water planets that are covered by one big ocean, and as it is known that life in God began in the sea and not on land. There are also opinions that there are chances for life on one of Jupiter's moons, Europa, which probably contains an ocean that is larger than all the oceans combined on Earth, under its ice cover.
In my opinion it is not very likely that they will sustain life - most of these planets are gravitationally locked with their planet Saturn, so that one side is very hot, and the other is very cold. In addition, because the stars are small, the attack time is very fast and it is possible that this will cause extremely extreme seasonal changes/relatively violent weather.
I would be happy to be corrected if I am wrong.