NASA has recently discovered a solar system 40 light years away with 7 earth-like planets
The 7 earth-like planets themselves orbit a star called Trappist-1 in the constellation Aquarius. It is a small dwarf star so the planets orbit pretty close to the star.
This is the kind of stuff that I love, more fuel for my webcomics. Gives us hope that there are a vast amount of Earth-like planets out there in the vast universe.
‘The first step in finding life outside our own planet is to find a planet like our own: small, rocky, and at just the right distance from the star that liquid water could exist on its surface.
That’s why an announcement today from NASA is so exciting: The space agency, along with partners around the world, has found seven potentially Earth-like planets orbiting a star 40 light-years away.
“It’s the first time that so many planets of this kind are found around a same star,” Michaël Gillon, the lead author of the Nature paper announcing the discovery, said in a press conference. “The seven planets … could have some liquid water and maybe life on the surface.”
Three of the planets are directly in the star’s habitable zone, meaning water can mostly likely exist on the surface of them. One of them, Gillon said, has a mass “strongly to suggest a water-rich composition.” And it’s possible that the other four could have liquid water, too, depending on the composition of their atmospheres, the astronomers said.’
In the meantime, we just have our imaginations to fill in the gap. This is an artist’s rendition of what the fifth planet in this bizarre solar system might look like. These planets are believed to be tidally locked to the star, each has a permanent day side and a permanent night side. And because the planets are so close together, they’d appear in the sky like moons.