A Star With SEVEN Earth-like Planets

An international team of astronomers today announced that they have found a faint cool star that is surrounded by a system of seven planets, each of which resemble the Earth in size. Three of the planets orbits in what we call the "habitable zone" where water can be liquid and temperatures might be right for life.

The star, located about 40 light years away, is so faint and cool, it doesn't have a name like bright stars do. It's referred to by the name of the telescope that discovered it and given a number (TRAPPIST 1). Each of the planets is then given a letter from b to h. (See the diagram above.)

Note that the planets are all very close to their dim star, taking from 1.5 days to about 20 days to orbit it. (By comparison, the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury, takes 88 days to orbit.) Planets e, f, and g are the ones where the combination of a cool little star and close-by planet work out to make the temperatures potentially reasonable for life. This star enters the record books as the one with the largest number of Earth-like planets, and the largest number of candidate planets in the habitable zone.

Astronomers caution that the kind of star these planets live around (called an "ultra-cool red dwarf") tends to have a lot of "activity" on its surface when they are young. Great flares of energy and particles are given off in this kind of activity, which might flood the nearby planets with high-energy radiation. That might not be so healthy for the formation of life there until the star settles down to a more stable adult existence.

On the other hand, such low-mass stars (this one contains only 8% of the "stuff" our Sun has) tend to live much much longer than a star like the Sun, so there may eventually be a much longer opportunity for the planets to evolve their surfaces and atmospheres and give birth to life.

Another complication for planets so very close to their star is that their motion probably resembles that of our Moon in a crucial way. The Moon (and these planets) take the same time to orbit as to spin, which means they keep the same face toward the object they go around. So one side of each planet always faces their star and the other side is always in darkness. There is no day and night cycle on these worlds -- you either live on the star-facing side and have perpetual day or you live on the other side and have perpetual night. Only a significant atmosphere might make such a world more bearable and astronomers are using a variety of telescopes to probe whether these planets are surrounded by an air layer and how much and what kind of air they have.

Just to put the discovery in context, astronomers now know over 3,000 planets orbiting other stars, ranging from balls of gas and liquid much bigger than Jupiter, down to rocky balls smaller than Venus. Experts now estimate that perhaps half of the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy may possess planets, and many stars will have more than one planet, just like TRAPPIST 1 and the Sun do. The universe seems rich with planets of all kinds, making it more likely than ever that we are not the only form of semi-intelligent life in the cosmos.

Below is a little poster NASA created to show how the other planets in this system would look from the surface of one of them.

A Tight Little Planet System, Dancing to the Tune of Gravity

Careful measurements using information from the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft has allowed astronomers to figure out one of the tightest and most synchronized planet systems ever found.

Kepler 80 is a dim star in the constellation of Cygnus the swan, 1100 light years away, that has five planets orbiting it. That by itself is not unusual -- astronomers have now discovered a number of stars with 7, 6, or 5 planets around them and more are likely to be discovered as time goes by. What IS unusual is how tightly these five planets all hug their star.

The five planets take one, three, four, seven and nine earth days to orbit the star. (Think about that, their year is 1, 3, 4, 7, or 9 DAYS! If you lived on the inner planet, you would be 365 of its years old after one Earth year had gone by.)

Even more interesting, the outer 4 planets have orbits that are synchronized -- they are in tune, you might say. They return to the same arrangement of their positions around their star every 27 days. This is called a gravitational resonance and it's something gravity prefers to do when bodies can exchange energy.

Think of gravity like your uncle who is careful with his money -- they both prefer arrangements that are cheap! For example, gravity, when it can, tries to make bodies round, because then the pull on every point on the surface is the same -- which is the arrangement that takes the least energy.

When objects in space move around or with each other in a synchronized way, where one orbit is related to the other with numbers like 1 to 2 or 2 to 3, this requires less energy too. Pluto, for example, shows an extreme example of such resonances: Pluto takes 6.4 Earth days to spin and Pluto's big moon Charon takes 6.4 days to orbit the dwarf planet. So Pluto's day and month are the same length. Charon also takes 6.4 days to spin, so we have a 1 to 1 to 1 resonance of these motions.

Calculations show that the planets dancing in resonance around Kepler 80 are rocky world like our own Earth, although at least some of its planets are 4 to 6 times Earth's size. Imagine these giant Earths whipping around that little star in Cygnus in 1 to 9 days, year in and year out, lining up every 27 days in a kind of cosmic dance. Nature seems to permit so many odd and wonderful line-ups of planets out there -- science fiction is having trouble catching up to science fact.

(Just for comparison, the innermost planet in our own planetary system, Mercury, takes 88 days to orbit the Sun, and it is much smaller than Earth. So we have no large planets tightly hugging our star -- but a number of other stars besides Kepler 80 show such tight arrangements.)

Billions of Earth-like Planets

This week, the University of California, Berkeley and NASA's Kepler Telescope project jointly announced that the ongoing discovery of planets around other stars had yielded some exciting statistics: It now appears that one out of five Sun-like stars has an Earth-like planet!

One out of five! This means there are likely to be BILLIONS of earth-sized planets orbiting at comfortable distances from BILLIONS of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. All of us involved with SETI -- the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence -- are, of course, thrilled to hear this news. Our hope is that among all those planets, there are some where intelligent creatures with an interest in astronomy have developed and perhaps enjoy their own blogs with astronomy news like we do.

The latest stats about known planets around other stars are also record-breaking.  As of early November 2013, we have found 1039 planets around 787 stars beyond our solar system! (There are 173 stars so far where we have discovered more than one planet in the same system.)  In addition, the Kepler mission (which is searching for such planets from space) already has over 3000 candidate planets which are still being checked out!  And they still have a whole year's worth of data to go through.

I was interviewed on KQED, the San Francisco Bay Area public radio station, by Michael Krasny, the host of the Forum program, about all this -- and we were joined by the Berkeley graduate student who had done the basic work of making the estimates. If you want to hear the interview, it is available at:
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201311060930