Around 40 light-years away, seven Earth-sized planets have been spotted
orbiting closely around a small, ultra-cool star. It’s one of the
largest solar systems that’s ever been discovered outside of our own,
and it’s a particularly enticing find in the ongoing search for
extraterrestrial life. Six of the planets in the system may have the
right temperatures for liquid water to exist on their surfaces, and
astronomers are confident they’ll be able to get a more in-depth look at
these seven worlds with future space telescopes.
The planets, which have been named alphabetically from b to h, all orbit
closer to TRAPPIST-1 than Mercury orbits the Sun. The closest planet
takes just 1.5 Earth days to complete one orbit, while the farthest
planet takes around 20 days to circle the star. Because of this, they’re
all a super tight bunch. When TRAPPIST-1f and TRAPPIST-1g are at their
closest to one another, they’re just at three times the distance between
the Earth and the Moon. So if you were to stand on TRAPPIST-1f,
sometimes TRAPPIST-1g would look twice as big as the Moon in the sky.
“It’s remarkable that you could see another world right there,” Amaury
Triaud, an exoplanet fellow at the Kavli Institute at the University of
Cambridge and a study author.
source: theverge
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