Travelers In The Night29 Elo 2023

249E-261-Cool Star Homes

Recently Dr. Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium and a team of astronomers hypothesized since that approximately 2/3 of the stars in our neighborhood are red dwarf stars some of them might host inhabitable planets. To test this idea the researchers began to carefully monitor some nearby red dwarfs with a robotic telescope in Chile to see if any of them the have regular dips in brightness which indicate the presence of planets orbiting them.
This team of astronomers were delighted when a faint star in an infrared star catalogue showed regular dips in brightness indicating the presence of three planets. Followup observations by the European Southern Observatories' 8 meter telescope in Chile confirmed the presence of three Earth sized planets orbiting a star now known as TRAPPIST-1. This extremely faint red star is only slightly larger than the planet Jupiter and puts out 0.05% of the energy of our Sun. Two of its Earth sized planets orbit every 1.5 and 2.4 days receiving four and two times the radiation the Earth receives from our Sun. They are probably two hot to be habitable. The third Earth sized planet orbits farther away and thus might have life permitting temperatures on its surface.
The discovery of three Earth sized planets orbiting the extremely, cool, faint red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 suggests the possibility of the presence of many more relatively nearby Earth like planets. The next generation of ground and space based telescopes will tell us about their surface conditions.

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Jaksot(1000)

916-Past Glory

When accurately recorded historical observations do not agree with what we what we see today it is often very rewarding to find out why. In modern telescopes we see Theta Eridani to a be pair separate...

11 Syys 2min

405E-446-Asteroid Homestead

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they...

8 Syys 2min

915-Raining Comets

The comets we observe generally start out as icy dirty snowballs of frozen gases like water and frozen carbon dioxide in the Oort cloud. If recent scientific analysis is correct, we are now witnessing...

4 Syys 2min

404E-445-Not So Secret

A partnership of humans and computers will help to minimize the damage when asteroid hunters find a space rock with our number on it.

1 Syys 2min

914-Deep Synoptic Array

Looking into the sky at night with radio eyes you would not see the points of starlight forming the constellations instead you would see a very bright, colorful and wildly changing scene. In a desert ...

28 Elo 2min

403E-444-Near Comets

Although no comet nucleus impact on the Earth has been conclusively identified, there is some evidence that suggests the 1908 Tunguska event in Russia, which knocked down trees over a 770 square mile ...

25 Elo 2min

913-Moon Impact

Bill Gray is an astronomer who specializes in tracking objects in space which come near the Earth. In addition to natural objects like asteroids and comets Bill also tracks rocket boosters and space j...

21 Elo 2min

402E-443-Unsung Heroes

In 2017 observers in 50 countries at 440 different observatories made nearly 19 million observations of asteroids and comets which enable scientists to calculate where about 800,000 objects will be in...

18 Elo 2min