The astronomer Rafael Bachiller reveals to us in this series the most spectacular phenomena of the Cosmos. Pulsating research topics, astronomical adventures and scientific news about the Universe analyzed in depth.
the planetary system TRAPPIST-1 is located just 40 light years away and has several rocky planets similar to those in the solar system. However, recent observations indicate that these planets have lost their atmospheres.
In 2016, astronomers announced the detection of three planets around a small red dwarf star in the constellation Aquarius. As the discovery was made with the Small Telescope of Transiting Planets and Planetesimals (TRAPPIST), located in Chile, the star was named TRAPPIST-1. The short distance to this star, only 40 light years, made this planetary system one of the most interesting to be studied from Earth.
But the biggest surprise about TRAPPIST-1 came on February 22, 2017, when the discovery of four additional planets around this same star was announced. And what is more surprising, it was deduced that the seven planets are small and rocky (similar to Earth), and that three of them (the so-called TRAPPIST-1e, fyg) are in the “habitable zone”, that is, in an area where the temperature is adequate to allow the presence of liquid water. From then on these exoplanets were considered to be the best for studying the atmospheres of potentially habitable Earth-like worlds.
However, the differences between the TRAPPIST-1 system and our solar system are very large. TRAPPIST-1 is a star much smaller and cooler than our Sun. TRAPPIST-1’s seven planetary orbits are closer to its host star than Mercury is to the Sun, and the planets are also very close to each other. It’s like a miniature solar system. A person standing on the surface of one of these exoplanets could look up and make out the clouds or the surface of its neighboring worlds, as some of them would appear larger than the Moon seen in Earth’s sky.