The two planets closest to TRAPPIST-1 may have daysides that are too hot and nightsides that are too cold to host any kind of life as it is known on Earth, but the researchers suggest that the borders of the planets' day- and nightsides may be sweet spots temperate enough for life.įor the most part, exoplanet-hunting missions have focused on finding systems around sun-like stars emitting visible light, but these stars can be so bright, they can drown out key features of their planets, the researchers said. ![]() The third of TRAPPIST-1's planets, the one farthest from the star, may lie within the star's habitable zone - the area around a star where planets have surfaces warm enough to have liquid water, a key ingredient to life as it is known on Earth. The small size of the star and its planets' orbits means "the structure of this planetary system is much more similar in scale to the system of Jupiter's moons than to that of the solar system," Gillon said in the statement. The orbit of the third planet is currently less certain, ranging between 4.5 and 73 days long. The two innermost planets are about 60 to 90 times closer to their star than the Earth to the sun, with orbits only 1.5 and 2.4 days long, respectively. "The kind of planets we've found are very exciting from the perspective of searching for life in the universe beyond Earth," study co-author Adam Burgasser at the University of California, San Diego, said in a statement. ![]() ![]() These three planets are each only about 10 percent larger in diameter than Earth. "So far, the existence of such 'red worlds' orbiting ultracool dwarf stars was purely theoretical, but now we have not just one lonely planet around such a faint red star, but a complete system of three planets," study co-author Emmanuël Jehin, an astronomer at the University of Liège, said in a statement.
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