3 ms·

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 ove

• 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.