3 newly-discovered nearby planets are a game changer in the hunt for alien life
The scientists have deemed all three planets potentially habitable, an exciting turn in the hunt for exoplanets, a term for planets that orbit a star other than our sun. And it could bring us closer to finding extraterrestrial life.
The hunt for aliens
The host star is an ultra-cool dwarf star - a type of cool, red star. Most of the time, these stars are too small and faint to be detected by optical telescopes, and this star is no exception.
"Why are we trying to detect Earth-like planets around the smallest and coolest stars in the solar neighborhood? The reason is simple: systems around these tiny stars are the only places where we can detect life on an Earth-sized exoplanet with our current technology," Michaël Gillon, lead author of the paper presenting the discovery, said in an ESO press release. "So if we want to find life elsewhere in the Universe, this is where we should start to look."
The astronomers discovered the planets using a telescope in Chile called TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST).
The telescope is designed to focus on nearby dwarf stars and search for planets orbiting them. Because light from the star is dimming at regular intervals, it suggested that several planets were orbiting the star.
The star is about an eighth the size of the sun, half the temperature and almost 2,000 times fainter. This is the first time astronomers have ever found any planets orbiting a star this small and dim.
Sweet spots
"These planets are so close, and their star so small, we can study their atmosphere and composition, and further down the road, which is within our generation, assess if they are actually inhabited," co-author Julien de Wit, a postdoc in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences said in an MIT press release.
These findings open the door for future studies of other ultra-cool dwarf stars, which are long-lived and common in the Milky Way. Around three fourths of all stars and 15% of the stars near to the Sun are ultra-cool dwarf stars.
With the help of several giant telescopes that are under construction, de Wit says, scientists will soon be able to study the atmospheric composition of these planets to explore them for water and traces of biological activity.
The full results were published Monday, May 2 in the journal Nature.