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Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

• bcaulfield 10y ago
  Let's go
  • 1001101 10y ago
    Well, it's estimated that it will still be around in 4-5 trillion years, so, if we can get there, and it's habitable, that gives humanity a little longer lease in the universe.
    • dagenleg 10y ago
      Source on the 'trillions of years' number?
      • saalweachter 10y ago
        "Common" knowledge; the brighter the star the faster it burns. Sun-like stars last billions of years, dwarf stars last for trillions, the real giants last for millions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf
      • 1001101 10y ago
        I got you -- The accompanying Nature paper gives a 10 trillion year figure.
  • ionwake 10y ago
    It's a Trap ;) On a serious note, if we can travel close to the speed of light , say 95%, using for example, nuclear rockets, how long would it take to arrive ? ( from the travellers perspective )
    • jxcole 10y ago
      It's 39 light years so no fewer than 39 years from our perspective. The closer to the speed of light the travelers are the less time will appear to have elapsed from their perspective. If you had rockets that could instantaneously accelerate to infinitessimally close to the speed of light, no time at all would appear to have elapsed from the travelers perspective (or no time that they would notice), but this is very unlikely.
    • trcollinson 10y ago
      Well it is approximately 40 light years away from our solar system. So the basic calculation would say about 42 years but this doesn't account for acceleration and deceleration and such.
    • vkou 10y ago
      At a constant 1g of acceleration, you could travel there, from the traveler's point of view, in ~2-3 years. (And in ~40 years from a stationary observer's point of view.) Mind you, a constant 1g acceleration (Or accelerating any human-carrying spaceship to relativistic speeds, really,) is about as plausible as a spaceship driven by pixie dust and unicorn farts.
      • ionwake 10y ago
        Not according to public research on theoretical designs that have been about for decades . Unless you consider them unicorn farts! I'm only a coder though so I have no knowledge of this domain tho. I think the problem is simply it's too expensive to build space ships that probably won't work at all :( wasnt NASAs budget slashed ?
        • twoodfin 10y ago
          It's not money, it's the basic rocket equation: Newtonian acceleration requires fuel and the mass of fuel makes acceleration more costly. Relativity makes things even worse.
          • 10y ago
• eb0la 10y ago
  At Voyager-I speed (17km/s) we need just 688k years to get there. Not bad considering the humble satelite doesn't accelerate anymore.
  • mtgx 10y ago
    I doubt we'll attempt serious inter-stellar travel before we figure out antimatter or black hole-powered engines. So we may have to wait a century or two. This century we should be more worried about making fusion-powered intra-solar system travel a common thing, and about establishing large colonies on Mars and several moons.
    • kakarot 10y ago
      I don't know about all of that speculation, but you did give me a nice mental image of a barren, battle-scarred solar system littered with battleships containing black holes, ready to cause catastrophe at any moment, much like the nuclear wastelands of the Arctic.
      • SapphireSun 10y ago
        The black hole engines he's referring to glow very hot because they're very small, meaning that the surface of the hole is large compared with its volume. This allows for very bright hawking radiation if I understand correctly. If you stop feeding them they disappear within hours, years, or decades depending on how big they are.
      • mtgx 10y ago
        Yeah, black holes scare me, too. But to me it looks like the most "realistic" solution for travelling 10+ light-years. If we learn how to create cheap antimatter, we may be able to use that, too, but I'm not so sure if we could store that much on the ship for the roundtrip. A blackhole could last us a lot longer (I think around 100 light years, last I read about it - I don't remember the space ship's speed, but probably like 30% of light speed).
    • hcarvalhoalves 10y ago
• dmix 10y ago
  My favourite part of the press release: > The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky. > In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf – is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-telescope-reveals-largest-batch-of-earth-size-habitable-zone-planets-around/ https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-telescope-reveals-la...
  • bcaulfield 10y ago
    So, basically, this is cooler than just about any world that's been depicted in sci-fi.
    • chrisabrams 10y ago
      I was essentially thinking the same thing. I wonder if an elevator could be built between all of them?
      • cletusw 10y ago
        I imagine their relative distances change frequently, so probably not.
      • Sharlin 10y ago
        They are still in separate orbits so the straight line between any two varies greatly in length... not to mention intersecting the star regularly.
        • longerthoughts 10y ago
          Regular shuttles for interplanetary travel timed with periodically favorable orbital positions?
• cletusw 10y ago
  Apparently finds are close enough to us that we should be able "to follow up, to see, for example with the James Webb Space Telescope that we're going to launch [next] year, the atmospheres and also to look at bio-signatures, if there are any" !
  • twoodfin 10y ago
    Optically? That's nuts! Anyone know how this would work? Can we really expect Webb to measure light diffraction/refraction through a few miles of atmosphere on a planet 40 ly away?
    • semaphoreP 10y ago
      It'll be in the near-infrared, but the light won't be separated from the star. How they observe the atmosphere is that when the exoplanets transit, they block out different amounts of light at different wavelengths. From that, one can deduce an atmospheric spectrum.
      • mturmon 10y ago
        Absolutely right. Here is a recent paper on exoplanet atmosphere characterization by JWST: https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05528 https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05528 -- the overview is at https://jwst.nasa.gov/origins.html https://jwst.nasa.gov/origins.html As you say, the contrast between seeing (star + planet) during a transit, versus star alone, is enough to identify absorption of infrared light by some chemical species. The simulations in the above paper basically show they can infer some chemical abundances (carbon, oxygen) and some atmospheric parameters (inversion layers) for Neptunes and Jupiters. But probably not for Earths, so not for the system in the OP. Even for big, thick atmospheres, these spectroscopic characterizations take a lot of observation time (like, days). The race is indeed on to develop instruments and algorithms for this problem -- e.g., detecting CH4 or CO2 in an exo-Earth atmosphere. There's feverish activity in the Astronomy community around this, and post-JWST missions are being formulated to tackle the problem.
      • sand500 10y ago
• cletusw 10y ago
  Link to live stream on YouTube (supports rewinding) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdmHHpAsMVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdmHHpAsMVw
• rubicon33 10y ago
  I was reading up about earth alternatives recently, and upon realizing the distance was always going to limit us, no matter how perfect the planet, I realized we need to travel at the speed of light. I think our "best shot" at that right now, is to digitize humans. If we could store consciousness in binary, we could then transmit it at the speed of light (like we do with data every day!). You'd need a receiver on the distant planet though. So, your first 'payload' would have to be the receiver, and it would need to travel the slow old fashioned way :(
  • NickBusey 10y ago
    Why not just make that first payload contain actual humans? Seems a helluva lot simpler.
    • rubicon33 10y ago
      You could, and probably would. But, how would you send everyone else? That 'traditional' method (carbon based fuels to propel a heavy payload) is extremely expensive, and slow. So if you ever wanted to send more than just 1 payload, you'd quickly reach resource limitations (namely cost, and time).
      • robin_reala 10y ago
        Why would you need to send more? Humans are natural von Neumann machines.
    • imglorp 10y ago
      Yup, for several hundred thousand year's journey. No problem. :-) I would just hope my emacs session will stay up that long.
      • marrone12 10y ago
        Interstellar tramp.
• petrikapu 10y ago
  Three of those discovered planets are in habitable zone https://www.dropbox.com/s/bdeog7ta7i4rb7c/alien%20planets.png?raw=1 https://www.dropbox.com/s/bdeog7ta7i4rb7c/alien%20planets.pn...
  • jff 10y ago
    Are you basing that statement purely on the appearance of the planets in the artist's conception you linked, or was it stated in another article somewhere?
    • cgriswald 10y ago
      It was stated by the scientists at the NASA press release. They also stated that all seven of the planets have the potential for liquid water depending on (unspecified) circumstances.
      • jff 10y ago
        Awesome, thank you.
    • petrikapu 10y ago
      It was said by one of the scientist in live Nasa TV broadcast https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/
• desireco42 10y ago
  Is this from NASA news conference that was announced for today? I couldn't find it in article? They said they have important announcement.
  • castis 10y ago
    Yes, the exoplanet discovery was the important announcement.
• 6502nerdface 10y ago
  > Gillon says that the six inner planets probably formed farther away from their star and then migrated inward. Now, they are so close to each other that their gravitational fields interact, nudging one another in ways that enabled the team to estimate each planet's mass. They range from around 0.4 to 1.4 times the mass of the Earth. Given that these planets are so close to each other, and interacting with each other gravitationally, how likely is it that their orbital arrangement is stable over geological time?
  • mturmon 10y ago
    According to the Nature paper (last section of http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v542/n7642/full/nature21360.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v542/n7642/full/nature2...) -- We computed [via n-body and other simulations] that TRAPPIST-1 has a 25% chance of suffering an instability over 1 Myr, and an 8.1% chance of surviving for 1 billion years (Gyr), in line with our n-body integrations. And, further, However, [these lifetimes] do not take into account the proximity of the planets to their host star and the resulting strong tidal effects that might act to stabilize the system. ... The masses and exact eccentricities of the planets remain uncertain, and our results make it likely that only a very small number of orbital configurations lead to stable configurations. ... The system clearly exists, and it is unlikely that we are observing it just before its catastrophic disruption, so it is probably stable over a long timescale. These facts and the results of our dynamical simulations indicate that, given enough data, the very existence of the system should bring strong constraints on its components’ properties...
    • deleted 10y ago
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  • goombastic 10y ago
    If we could do large scale engineering we would engineer something like this I suppose to increase the habitable worlds in a system.
• r721 10y ago
  Wiki says "TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star that is approximately 8% the mass of and 11% the radius of the Sun. It has a temperature of 2550 K and is at least 500 million years old." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1 Too young star for alien life hopes?
  • stupidcar 10y ago
    Well, it's "at least" 500m, but is probably much more[1]: "Determining the ages of such small stars is difficult because they evolve so slowly over their lifetimes of trillions of years but it is estimated to be in excess of a half a billion years and is probably much more." And abiogenesis occurred on Earth within about 500m years of the Earth's formation, so life can clearly arise pretty quickly. It's complex, multi-cellular life that seems to be hard part. Although this is based on our observations of a single example. [1] http://www.drewexmachina.com/2016/05/03/habitable-planet-reality-check-trappist-1/ http://www.drewexmachina.com/2016/05/03/habitable-planet-rea...
    • hughes 10y ago
      > trillions of years This is off by several orders of magnitude. Like estimating the age of your neighbor to be somewhere around 400,000 years old.
      • dwaltrip 10y ago
        Uh? I think it's widely accepted that our best models of small stars are fairly well understood, and predict that they will continue to fuse hydrogen in their cores for more than a trillion years.
        • kakarot 10y ago
          Referring to an average of 1-2 trillion years as "trillions of years" is either misleading, uninformed, lazy, or a combination of the 3. When dealing with hard science it's important to choose your descriptors wisely. Most readers will not follow up.
• e0m 10y ago
  To get a spacecraft there it would take: Accelerating at 1g the 1st half, and decelerating at 1g the 2nd half, the traveler would experience 7.3 years of time. For observers it would take 41.8 years at a max speed of 0.998c If you had a near perfect hydrogen -> helium fusion engine, it'd take about 6 million tons of fuel (about the mass of the Pyramids of Egypt or 2,000 Saturn V rockets)
  • pm90 10y ago
    What if we used engines powered by nuclear energy (fission or fusion)? Could we reduce the amount of fuel, since the energy density is so much higher?
    • Sharlin 10y ago
      The GP already posits a theoretical perfect fusion drive.
      • pm90 10y ago
        Ah, yes. My bad.
    • janekm 10y ago
      This estimation was already assuming a fusion engine.
    • mcculley 10y ago
      You still need reaction mass.
  • jdormit 10y ago
    We don't have any spacecraft that can go that fast, do we?
    • JorgeGT 10y ago
      No. If I'm not mistaken we're in the order of magnitude of 0.0001c.
• h4nkoslo 10y ago
  Uh oh. The "great filter" hypothesis is essentially that the rarity of intelligent life has to be explained by some parameter of the Drake equation, and that whatever the "small" parameter is is either in our past or in our future. If the "great filter" is the rarity of habitable worlds, then clearly we don't need to fear it, since we already found one. But if habitable worlds aren't rare, then it's more likely it lies in our future (e.g. global thermonuclear war, plague, difficulty of space travel, etc). Thus things like discovery of exoplanets, bacteria on mars, etc should make us rather concerned. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • root_axis 10y ago
    The theory as described in your link seems to hand-wave away the difficulties incumbent in the "colonization explosion" step. As it stands, intergalactic space travel (at scale) is utterly inconceivable in practical terms, and to simply assume that it is inevitable seems like a major flaw in the theory.
    • idbehold 10y ago
      > then it's more likely it lies in our future (e.g. global thermonuclear war, plague, difficulty of space travel, etc) Difficulty of space travel is one of the possible filters.
      • root_axis 10y ago
        Ah. I guess I was responding to > the only thing that appears likely to keep us from [colonization explosion] is some sort of catastrophe or resource exhaustion leading to the impossibility of making the step due to consumption of the available resources (like for example highly constrained energy resources).
    • svachalek 10y ago
      Actually, the article explicitly calls out that step as one potential "great filter". It also (click the link) lists the theoretical ways it could be accomplished. It seems to leave out the Von Neumann Probe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft This is not exactly colonization but possibly an easier step. Either way, the point is that if either we or our machines can get to another star system and repeat the process from there, exponential growth means it pretty much doesn't even matter how long it takes. In astronomical time, we'd cover the galaxy in the blink of an eye.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• jobu 10y ago
  The article mentions the star being an ultra-cool dwarf star, but doesn't give an explanation of what that means. Here's some info from Wikipedia that I found useful: TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star that is approximately 8% the mass of and 11% the radius of the Sun. It has a temperature of 2550 K and is at least 500 million years old. In comparison, the Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and has a temperature of 5778 K. Due to its mass, the star has the ability to live for up to 4–5 trillion years ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• fsloth 10y ago
  "Due to its mass, the star has the ability to live for up to 4–5 trillion years" So when the rest of the universe cools off and stars start to die, Trappist one keeps on shining and shining... We need to get there. But first, let's get rid of our genocidal tendencies.
  • lutorm 10y ago
    It's not just that one. The vast majority of stars, by number (but not by light), are stars like these. The universe might dim, but it won't be dark for a long, long time.
    • fsloth 10y ago
      Yes, in all bayesian likeness this is a class of star systems that populates the universe. Suddenly the universe does not seem so dark and foreboding anymore.
  • timdeneau 10y ago
    Don’t worry, in five billion years that will be some other Earthling’s problem.
  • ucontrol 10y ago
    The optimism in this thread regarding the practical feasibility of long-distance space travel is encouraging. I truly hope it's just another hurdle for us to technologically overcome, rather than an insurmountable barrier. Even if it weren't doable, who knows what kind of destiny awaits us as our mastery over physics advances.
• webmaven 10y ago
  Hah, called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698672
• andrewclunn 10y ago
  They're only one Kessel Run away!
  • awful 10y ago
    Or, maybe our Zyra.
• blueprint 10y ago
  Let's do this.
• sigmaprimus 10y ago
  Based on Voyagers current speed it would take approximately 18000 years to reach this system, the referance of a jet airplane taking millions of years seemed a bit misleading, with current technology and using gravitational boosting I would think that the time could be much less. Maybe it would be worth sending a probe? Granted I will never see it in my lifetime but it might be a project I could get behind.
  • 83457 10y ago
    Probably used jet airplane more of a frame of reference for the general public.
  • pvg 10y ago
    18k years is a very long time, though. There is a project looking at the feasibility of getting very small probes somewhere 10 times closer in perhaps decades rather than millennia: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/alpha-centauri-breakthrough-starshot-yuri-milner-stephen-hawking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/alpha-centauri-br...
    • sigmaprimus 10y ago
      That is exactly what I meant, thank you for the link. I defiantly would support projects like that.
      • pshposh 10y ago
        I suspect you meant definitely and not defiantly.
  • Cyphase 10y ago
    Unless you're talking about a Starshot-type probe, I think it's probably better to wait for improved propulsion technology that would end up arriving before a probe we sent now.
• sizzzzlerz 10y ago
  Once again, the universe shows that not only is it strange, it's stranger in ways we can't possibly imagine. This is truly a golden age of space science and, as Kay said in M.I.B., "I wonder what we'll know tomorrow.".
• pkituu 10y ago
  You can visualize all confirmed exoplanets using NASA's Eyes on the Exoplanets software. http://eyes.nasa.gov/eyes-on-exoplanets.html http://eyes.nasa.gov/eyes-on-exoplanets.html Requires download and install. OS X and Windows only :( Disclaimer: I am a developer of this software for NASA.
• scj 10y ago
  It'll be interesting to see this reflected in the Drake equation (average number of planets per star that can potentially support life). It'd be amazing if the number was above 1 (or terrible if you believe in the Great Filter hypothesis).
• sperglord 10y ago
  raises the question
  • criddell 10y ago
    That's essentially what blueprint said. You didn't have any trouble figuring out what blueprint was saying, right?
    • purple-again 10y ago
      What's wrong with begs the question? It's a regular part of my vocabulary and I'm a southern American.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • achr2 10y ago
        'begging the question' is the name of a specific logical fallacy and is not grammatically correct. You could say 'begs for the question' or as the parent comment suggests...
      • MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
        It's true that people use it that way without issue in everyday conversation, but technically "begging the question" is a logical fallacy in which a statement/proposition presupposes its own truth. See http://begthequestion.info/ http://begthequestion.info/ for further info (and a laugh that this site exists).
      • cyphar 10y ago
        "Begs the question" refers to a logical fallacy[1], though in modern language usually it's conflated with "invites the question" (which is what people generally mean when they say "begs the question" outside of a comment thread on Reddit). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
• kristianc 10y ago
  Do we know definitively that there are no other planets in this system? The presence of a large, Jupiter-sized planet in a system is thought to be helpful for deflecting asteroid impacts. Obviously we are talking 'to scale' given TRAPPIST-1 itself is around the size of Jupiter! The more we learn about this system is going to be fascinating though - the supposed inward migration of these planets may even help us understand more about how our own system formed.
  • semaphoreP 10y ago
    I don't think we know for sure, but it'd be hard to place another star in the system and have it a) not disrupt the planets and b) go unnoticed as the primary star is so faint.
  • pshposh 10y ago
    Is it possible there isn't an asteroid belt to be concerned about?
• johngalt 10y ago
  Close orbit around a relatively cold star. Interesting. I wonder what their 'day' vs 'year' looks like. Also their atmosphere and surface pressure. They could be 7 copies of Venus for all we know.
  • imdsm 10y ago
    If they are tidally locked as reported, then there will be no day, not really. Just as there is no day on the moon.
    • strictnein 10y ago
      The moon rotates once every ~27 days, so its day is ~27 days. It's just in sync with its orbit of the earth, so it appears to us that it doesn't rotate. http://www.space.com/24871-does-the-moon-rotate.html http://www.space.com/24871-does-the-moon-rotate.html
      • visakanv 10y ago
        Isn't that technically the moon's "year"?
        • idbehold 10y ago
          A year generally refers to the time something takes to make one revolution around its closest star.
  • idbehold 10y ago
    > Because the planets are so close to Trappist-1, they have quite likely become “gravitationally locked” to the star, always with one side of the planets facing the star, much as it is always the same side of Earth’s moon facing Earth. Also, during the live stream they said that the furthest planet does a complete orbit around the star in 20 Earth days. So there are likely no 'days' on any of these planets and a 'year' goes by in less than a month on Earth.
• coryfklein 10y ago
  I'm having a hard time finding more data on the density of matter in interstellar space. Wikipedia says > The density of matter in the interstellar medium can vary considerably: the average is around 10^6 particles per m3 but cold molecular clouds can hold 10^8–10^12 per m3 [1] But I imagine that interstellar gas would be easier to fly through than interstellar sand. Do we know the composition of matter in interstellar space? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space#Interstellar_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space#Interstellar_space
  • semaphoreP 10y ago
    It's almost all Hydrogen/Helium gas. Other larger atoms and molecules are known to exist in the interstellar medium, but it's primary gas. Also, a good way to remember the density is ~1 Hydrogen atom per cm^3.
    • infogulch 10y ago
      How about intergalactic densities?
      • semaphoreP 10y ago
        Don't know the number off the top of my head, but it should be considerably less. It should also be highly varying as some galaxies live in pretty densely packed environments (galaxy clusters), which some live in very open environments like our own galaxy.
        • infogulch 10y ago
          Nothing like a little "look it up yo damn self": Looks like it's about 1 hydrogen per m^3 [1] (via SO [2]), about 1 million times less dense. Damn. [1]: http://www.universetoday.com/30280/intergalactic-space/ [2]: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25378/how-vacuous-is-intergalactic-space/25379#25379
    • ar15saveslives 10y ago
• mozumder 10y ago
  So, who do we call to make sure the newly discovered planets are named Chimay, Orval, Westvleteren, Rochefort, Westmalle, Achel, and La Trappe?
  • iamdave 10y ago
    40 light years = 12.2 parsecs. I mean I feel like an opportunity was missed here...
• jonshariat 10y ago
  This news is very interesting but how is this different than any of the recent planet discoveries? Anyone mind explaining the significance of this discovery over the others?
  • Retric 10y ago
    7 is a very high number of planets in an odd system overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplanetary_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplanetary_systems PS: Note the above systems may have many planets we don't know about.
  • cgriswald 10y ago
    1. There are a lot of them (seven). 2. They are all Earth sized. 3. There are a lot of them in the habitable zone (three). 4. Even those not in the habitable zone could contain liquid water under certain circumstances. 5. This star is insanely close-by (39 ly). Basically, if you're looking for a second Earth, this is an incredible gift. Even if we don't find a second Earth among these seven planets, they could tell us a lot about the likelihood of life around red dwarf stars, which is significant, because the vast majority of stars are red dwarfs. That's in addition to the information they can probably provide on planet formation and makeup.
  • nikdaheratik 10y ago
    The number (as mentioned) is one huge difference. Not necessarily for purposes of exploration, but as something else to consider for part of the Drake equation. It's also another avenue of detection because it's such a small star, that means we can use different methods than just detecting the "wobble" to figure out whether there are planets around the star.
• dforrestwilson1 10y ago
  4 separate front-page posts about this on H/N so far..
• staltz 10y ago
  Is there information already on how the short distances between planets would affect G-forces felt on surface?
  • Retric 10y ago
    The earth moon distance is tiny, and the G-Forces are hard to directly measure.
• ygmelnikova 10y ago
  This is the hyped-up 'on the edge of your seat' NASA news announcement? Boy do they have their customer pegged.
• 5xman 10y ago
  So, are there any plans to try to "communicate" with this planets? Or we are going to just sit and watch.
  • TekMol 10y ago
    Well, we could send a message and then wait 80 years for a reply. So we might want to work on immortality first.
    • 5xman 10y ago
      I thought we were already working on immortality. On the other hand, waiting 80 years doesn't seem like much. It's not like we are going to be 'out for lunch' if there is an answer.
• novalis78 10y ago
  Let's change #OccupyMars to #OccupyTrappist ;-)
• tuyguntn 10y ago
  Every time I hear such news, I try to imagine how it feels being there, billions of miles away, looking at sky and saying "wow", I don't think we will be able to travel to distant planets in our lifetime, but thinking about it and trying to create that feeling always feels amazing to me.
  • 31reasons 10y ago
    If we use what we know about it and recreate the system in VR we could technically experience at least the visuals of being there.
• cletus 10y ago
  So this star is essentially going to live forever from what I understand (ie trillions of years). It's cool and the habitable zone is close to the star. So I know nothing about this kind of star but I was reading something last year talking about risks to life. There's of course the obvious like being hit by comets and asteroids, gamma ray bursts and so on. But there's also CMEs (coronal mass ejections). A CME from the Sun directly hitting the Earth would be devastating. The chance of getting hit by a CME is inversely proportional to your distance from the star just because you occupy a smaller arc from the star's perspective. I wonder if this kind of star and having the worlds so close would pose a huge threat from CMEs. Does this kind of star even have the same number of CMEs as say the Sun?
• btkramer9 10y ago
  Even though each of the 7 planets are likely tidally locked it seems a habitable zone on each planet is still a possibility [1] [1] http://nautil.us/blog/forget-earth_likewell-first-find-aliens-on-eyeball-planets http://nautil.us/blog/forget-earth_likewell-first-find-alien...
• ant6n 10y ago
  It seems that this could be an interesting system to be targeted by a FOCAL mission. It is the idea to use the sun as a large telescope by using its gravitational sense. One would have to have a telescope placed about 550 AU or so away from the sun, on the opposite side of the system you want to look at. The magnification could be large enough to analyze features on exoplanets. My dream would be to build a telescope large enough, so that with the help of the gravitational lens of the sun we'd have a google-earth like view of the exoplanets. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-seventy-billion-mile-telescope http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-seventy-billion-m...
  • kk_cz 10y ago
    I was having hard time imaging 550 AU, so for context ( distances from the Sun): - Jupiter: ~5.2 AU - Pluto: ~39.5 AU - Voyager 1 ~137,75 AU
• chiph 10y ago
  Home planets of the puppeteers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers
• blueprint 10y ago
  > The launch cost of launching the mass of the pyramids of gaza into orbit would bankrupt the richest economies. Yeah… cause the way you're thinking about doing that is literally the only way in the world to accomplish the task. Not. It's not my job to qualify whether it HAS to be done to you. And even though I am the one presenting this information and this evidence, it is indeed your job to confirm it. Otherwise, you're not exactly doing science, are you? Nor are you really acting in your own best interest or that of mankind. It's almost as if you're fighting to rationalize doing nothing. You're free to do that. Just be honest about what you're doing, please. Sacrificing yourself is your choice. But you shouldn't deceive others in order to take them with you.
  • literallycancer 10y ago
    I don't think the way you are arguing your points does you any favors.
    • blueprint 10y ago
      Well, literallycancer, that begs the question of why nobody helps me with their ability and suggestions to argue better. I have had to do everything on my own. The way this message of mine is treated is perhaps the reason for or the reflection of the fact that mankind's usage of science and technology seem predetermined to lead to destruction. But feel free to ignore me. Everyone does whatever they want regardless of their reason, facts, or personal truths, anyway.
      • schoen 10y ago
        Your posts here have been pretty disparaging toward the scientific community. The scientific community does have problems with groupthink and cognitive biases, but it also has to contend with a flood of people who passionately defend idiosyncratic ideas without appearing to appreciate what counts as a scientific theory or scientific evidence. Every scientist and other technical domain expert has encountered dozens or hundreds of people offering the secret of why science is totally on the wrong track. (I don't work in physics or climate science, but I've experienced this in cryptography and number theory, which do relate to my job.) In order to be taken seriously, I'd suggest that novel physical theories should accurately use existing technical vocabulary and notation (and define and explain the motivation for any new vocabulary), be expressed in quantitative terms, not pick a fight with the scientific community or impugn its good faith or intelligence, and hopefully make empirical, testable predictions (including better-explaining observations compared to existing theories).
• peterkelly 10y ago
  12 parsecs? No problem, buddy. We've got the best ship in town. If you've got the dough I'm sure me and my buddy Chewy can work something out for ya.
• ausjke 10y ago
  Just curious, how is this related to us considering there are ziga-billion-stars/planets not-yet-be-found in the universe, why is this news important?
  • ucontrol 10y ago
    While the system itself is nothing extraordinary from a detached, theoretical point of view - we are aware that there are many planetary systems in the universe of all sorts and sizes - what makes this news so impressive in my opinion is the thrill of actually witnessing, almost tangibly, such an alien and wonderful system, excitingly different from our own (read the article in detail, fascinating stuff), amplified by the fact that these planets are relatively quite close. Basically, the system is so peculiar and close to us, now that we have actually discovered it is difficult not to be fascinated by it, even though we know it's nothing to be perplexed with in the grand scheme.
• blueprint 10y ago
  Physicists have got blinders on. Once we solve the gravity problem everything changes. I've been searching for a decade for scientists who can confirm my info but tbh most everyone seems to have abandoned themselves already.
  • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    > Once we solve the gravity problem I have a feeling I'm going to regret asking, but here we go: what "gravity problem"?
    • blueprint 10y ago
      You're familiar with the fact that there is no proper, substantial, accepted model or principle of both gravity and EM that unify them, correct? And we don't knowingly have the ability to build technology that manipulates gravity (trivial interpretations aside). And we also don't know how our actions actually affect the dynamic field that is gravity. Cause the stress-energy tensor says it is dynamic. Or perhaps I'm just completely bonkers. Life certainly would be a lot easier if I were.
      • Arizhel 10y ago
        What exactly are you saying? That once we really figure out gravity, faster-than-light travel will become possible? I've been saying that for years, and I'm no physicist. It's fairly obvious that gravity is not well understood by our physics. All we really know is that it correlates to the presence of mass: lots of mass (like a planet) equals a noticeable amount of gravity. Unlike electromagnetism, where we have the ability to actually create it and manipulate it at will, we have no such ability with gravity (aside from just moving mass around, which has little effect since gravitational force is so weak). So yeah, I've thought for a long time that understanding gravity is the key to warp drive, just because it's such an obvious blind spot. But I'm not sure how this is helpful; merely noticing that our understanding of gravity is poor doesn't actually help us understand it any better. What we need is to discover a physical effect whereby we can significantly manipulate gravity at will. Figure that out and you'll change everything.
• bikamonki 10y ago
  Ok Elon, only 39 light years away. When will you take us there?
• neom 10y ago
  My fav thing about the universe is the idea that evolution + ingredients in another order could create something totally bizarre and wonderful!!
• huula 10y ago
  See? I told you that seven is a magic number.
• rlanday 10y ago
  Now technically, according to the International Astronomical Union, these bodies can't be planets since they don't orbit the sun: https://www.iau.org/static/resolutions/Resolution_GA26-5-6.pdf https://www.iau.org/static/resolutions/Resolution_GA26-5-6.p... "1. A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun" Makes me wonder how much this definition of a planet was motivated by the desire to be able to give elementary schoolers a nice small set of things to memorize. Edit: actually I might be incorrect about this, the resolution is titled "Definition of a Planet in the Solar System", I'm not sure the IAU actually has a definition of what a "planet" would be outside the solar system, but they may be open to the idea that they exist :)
  • hughes 10y ago
    Are you saying that they don't orbit their star because some of them gravitationally influence each other? Or are you saying that nothing outside of our solar system can be a planet? Either way, NASA should schedule another press release about taking celestial pedantry to a new level.
    • rlanday 10y ago
      My understanding is that according to the IAU definition, a "planet" must orbit the sun and not any other star. Kind of reminds me of when people thought the solar system was the center of the universe.
      • acqq 10y ago
        The word planet comes from the ancient Greek word for "wanderer" which they used to refer to the wandering stars, the only stars that moved across the sky in relation the all other stars, only five of them visible, assigned to the gods and one goddess: Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus and Cronus. Since then, the definition of the planet had to be modified as there are a lot of bodies orbiting the Sun known today. According to the latest precise definition, even Pluto isn't a planet anymore (but a dwarf planet). In this light, I don't see the problem in making the difference between the planets (orbiting our Sun) and the exoplanets (orbiting other stars, see my other post here). These guys however would like to remove the International Astronomical Union's definition from 2006 and to introduce the new with which even the moons(!) of the planets would be called "planets": https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/how-positively-peeved-pluto-people-plan-to-pluck-back-plutos-planethood/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/how-positively-peeve... As the reporter cleverly summarized, their definition could be simpler stated as, "round objects in space that are smaller than stars." Then there would be around 110 such "planets" around the Sun, and the exoplanets would also be, of course, just "planets." Their reasoning: "In the mind of the public, the word “planet” carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies. In the decade following the supposed “demotion” of Pluto by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) [1], many members of the public, in our experience, assume that alleged “non-planets” cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration, though the IAU did not intend this consequence [1]. To wit: a common question we receive is, “Why did you send New Horizons to Pluto if it’s not a planet anymore?” To mitigate this unfortunate perception, we propose a new definition of planet, which has historical precedence [e.g., 2,3]. In keeping with both sound scientific classification and peoples’ intuition, we propose a geophysically-based definition of “planet” that importantly emphasizes a body’s intrinsic physical properties over its extrinsic orbital properties."
• fsloth 10y ago
  I would also like to point out: Giordano Bruno was right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno Although, he had no proof for his intuition, so I cannot entirely cherish him as a martyr for modern cosmology.
• mkoster 10y ago
  Well, lets hope on these guys to take us there ;) Apparently they are building a FTL engine. http://www.spacewarpdynamicsllc.com/latest-news http://www.spacewarpdynamicsllc.com/latest-news
• battlebot 10y ago
  The "artist's depiction" of the planets is always amusing--they haven't got the first clue what those planets look like.
• yohann305 10y ago
  it's worth mentioning that the light we receiving took 39 years to arrive to the telescope. So anything we see happened 39 years ago. I thought it'd be nice to know...
  • MrZongle2 10y ago
    No, it's 39 light-years away. Meaning that anything there that we can observe happened 39 years ago. Not 39 billion or billion.
    • ifdefdebug 10y ago
      Just to make sense of that reply: I remember the post was talking about 39 billion years but seemingly was edited without advice.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• Taniwha 10y ago
  So how come when NASA tells us there are tiny invisible planets light years away we all applaud, but somehow when they point to the evidence of climate change right here right now it's all a big con?
  • acid__ 10y ago
    This strikes me as a rather disingenuous question.
    • Taniwha 10y ago
      why? either you think NASA is good at science or you don't, you can't pick and choose depending on whether or not you like the results
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • acid__ 10y ago
        Okay, sure. I can give you a serious answer if you'd like. First of all, you're attempting to take down some strawman. _Who_ is applauding this discovery, and simultaneously calling NASA's climate change research "all a big con"? It's disingenuous when you just present a (IMHO) off-topic opinion that the majority of the other commenters here have, in the form of an innocent question. If you would like to discuss the view of a public figure or other commenter, that's fine. If you want to discuss how you think that people should accept NASA-related research as a whole or not at all, that's fine. But don't ask a false question to take down a strawman. Second, your statement "either you think NASA is good at science or you don't" is a massive trivialization. NASA is a 19 billion dollar organization, with over 17,000 employees (not counting contractors). Beyond the problems of the phrase "good at science" (What does it _mean_ to be "good at science"? That's an incredibly complex topic.), NASA is huge, with many, many different people and departments, opinions and beliefs, cultures, etc. Thinking of NASA as a fixed, singular, cohesive entity is a flawed assumption. And I guess finally, to get back to your original question, it's quite straightforward. The (economic, political) implications of habitable planets 40 light years away is quite different from the (economic, political) implications of American industrial and economic activity needing to be massively changed, very quickly. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon. But I don't feel that your original question was presented in the best possible way.
• libeclipse 10y ago
  Just for curiosities sake, using the best technology humanity could get its hands on, what's the best case for the time it would take to reach that solar system?
  • T-A 10y ago
    StarShot [1] is gunning for 20% of the speed of light. At that speed, it would take a couple hundred years. [1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/3 https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/3
• elif 10y ago
  Now we just need a 40,000 generation ship.
• c-smile 10y ago
  Therefore it appears as there are plenty of habitable planets out there. Numbers are big enough to conclude that other life is definitely out there somewhere so are the questions: 1. Where are they all? 2. How humanity will react on appearance of one of them? Will we finally stop our fights inside that sandbox and to focus on challenges that we are facing all together?
• keyle 10y ago
  Here is another article on it with a bit more info on the planets http://www.iflscience.com/space/breakthrough-in-search-for-life-as-seven-earthsized-worlds-found-orbiting-nearby-star/ http://www.iflscience.com/space/breakthrough-in-search-for-l...
• ahmetyas01 10y ago
  I knew it.
• debt 10y ago
  That's still soo far away though.
• neilellis 10y ago
  I wonder if SETI are going to point at it, you know, just incase :)
• alnitak 10y ago
  Depending on how habitable those planets are, if there was an actual entity modeling the universe for humans as some close minded ideologies tend to think, well we would be living there and not in a little blue island in the middle of desolation. Nice blow.
• meerita 10y ago
  Question to HN: If you can go, knowing you cannot get back, would you go to colonize the first planet?
• AYBABTME 10y ago
  With so much proximity between worlds and seemingly easier access to nearby space and it's resources, I feel that any sentient life in a system like this will have had a massive evolutionary advantage over us.
• sneezeplease 10y ago
  Such a shame no comments about flat earth on here. This site is full of idiots.
• mrfusion 10y ago
  Have we ever detected exo moons? If not when or how might that be possible.
• un008 10y ago
  Is it a good news for human? we know if cockroach stay at their nest, we don't suppose to kill them. But if they begin to explore their new world, i.e. Human's kitchen, then we want to kill them all.
• echelon 10y ago
  I imagine any intelligent life that evolves on a system with so many planets in such close proximity--many within the habitable zone, and each perhaps with atmospheres and organics--will have a much easier time than we do of pushing forward to becoming a multi-planetary species. We lucked out with Earth being as hospitable and resource rich as it is, but we're stuck in a deep gravity well with not much in our solar system to compel us to leave. That puts us at a relative disadvantage to other alien species that have the benefit of cheap and interesting neighbors to visit. I'm jealous to dream of what could have been had we evolved in a differently configured solar system.
  • bbarn 10y ago
    ..and what problems we don't have they might have! Planets too close, disrupting each other's ecosystems. The usable ice being distributed amongst several planets when the system was formed instead of a single one.. there's no end to catastrophic possibilities. This is why I still love sci-fi. Anything you can think of, put it on paper, and it could make for a great story.
    • alex_duf 10y ago
      Not to mention the whole "us" and "them" separation that would eventually arise the same way we have with our arbitrary borders. Hmm, wait we were talking about intelligent species, never-mind.
  • mememachine 10y ago
    > could have been You write like its all over. Pretty odd.
    • 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
      No, it's written like a thought on how we as a species would have evolved given the possibility of visiting a close planet instead of the moon at the same age of technology. I mean with closer proximity it would have been a race to a neighboring planet rather than touching down on the moon, and where we are now we could have feasibly accomplished interplanetary travel without issue already. His comment doesn't even bring up our current situation, but would could have been if we had closer neighboring planets.
• osazuwa 10y ago
  Firefly.
• sidcool 10y ago
  This is an exciting bit of news. 40 LY is relatively near compared to size of our galaxy.
• mmaunder 10y ago
  Is it me or does it feel like they've extrapolated a bit too much from the light of a star dimming at intervals?
• callumprentice 10y ago
  A few months ago, I made a simple WebGL app to compare the sizes of our sun and the planets for my 5 year old daughter who was curious. I updated it today to include the TRAPPIST system and see how it compares to our own solar system. http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/celestial_bodies/index.html?1=earth&2=trappist-b http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/celestial_bodies/index....
  • Snoddas 10y ago
    Very informative. Nicely done.
  • cmstoken 10y ago
    Really nice work. Bookmarked!
  • lukaszjb 10y ago
    Nice done! I didn't know that earth is so small compared to sun.
  • Raphmedia 10y ago
    I love it! The fact that you made it for your daughter is even better! Comparing our sun with Trappist's star is really interesting. Try to compare it with Jupiter. They are almost exactly the same.
  • callumprentice 10y ago
    Thanks for the nice feedback everyone. I had some time tonight after work and made an improved version with better selection UI and allows for multiple bodies at once: http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/celestial_bodies/index.html?v=2&1=trappist-1&2=trappist-1b&3=trappist-1c&4=trappist-1d&5=trappist-1e&6=trappist-1f&7=trappist-1g&8=trappist-1h&9=earth http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/celestial_bodies/index....
• irusri 10y ago
  I cant understand what can we possibly achieve from this type of explorations. NASA spends lot of money each year to excite us but nothing really achieved. Personal thought: Isn't worthy to spend this money for alleviation of poverty in this planet?
  • kk_cz 10y ago
    it's ~65$ per person per year. I am not American but if I were I would gladly give 65 bucks a year for some space related excitement.
• clark911 10y ago
  哇哦，建方舟
• vlindos 10y ago
  Let's bring some democracy there again!
• jlebrech 10y ago
  could we send a spaceship there as a projectile rather that have (all) the fuel on board?
• restlessmedia 10y ago
  I wonder how many javascript libraries they're up to already?
  • bb101 10y ago
    That gave me a chuckle. Safe to say they would be post-React by now, but probably still pre-SingularityJS.
• nepotism2016 10y ago
  James Webb Space Telescope is going to accelerate all of these discoveries by x100...star KIC 8462852 is clearly aliens!!!!
• joe636434 10y ago
  Why are people so excited about planet which is 39 light years away, when we are living in a society where 8 hours of slavery is required to survive. This is not listed focal.
  • weavie 10y ago
    That attitude is why you are subjecting yourself to 8 hours of slavery!
    • joe636434 10y ago
      May be u r right
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• nie 10y ago
  When I looked at the image[1] illustrating size/mass/orbit periods of TRAPPIST-1, I was fascinated by the orbit period: 6.10 days, for example, for planet e! Suppose we were to be able to stand on that planet and stargaze outwards, won't that be extremely dizzy? :) So what are the immediate (strange) properties brought forward by median of 6 days of orbit period? [1] http://www.space.com/images/i/000/062/962/original/trappist-1-4-PIA21425-1024x576.jpg?interpolation=lanczos-none&downsize=660:* http://www.space.com/images/i/000/062/962/original/trappist-...
  • alex_duf 10y ago
    Earth has a rotation period of 1 day (around itself). When stargazing a 1 day rotation period would be the same as 1 day orbital period whilst being tidally locked (which seem to be the case for these planets) I don't think anyone is getting dizzy down here so I would assume it would be the same there? or have I missed something?
• NicoJuicy 10y ago
  Fun detail, the discoverers are Belgian and Trappist is a name for a monk beer. We Belgians sure like our beer :)