NASA Exoplanet Discovery: Can These Planets Really Contain Alien Life?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 24 hours you might have noticed that NASA made a pretty huge announcement last night.

NASA announced that it had found not one, but seven Earth-like planets orbiting a single star.

What made things even more exciting was that it is just under 40 light years away.

While there has been a lot of hype surrounding the announcement and about what it could mean we thought we’d break things down into a simple Q&A that should hopefully put the discovery into perspective.

What Has NASA Actually Discovered

NASA has discovered seven exoplanets, all that could be described as Earth-like, and all orbiting a single star.

The solar system is called TRAPPIST-1 and it’s located about 235 trillion miles away in the Aquarius constellation.

What you may not know is that three of these planets are not new discoveries. Researchers first learnt about TRAPPIST-1’s exoplanets back in May 2016 when they announced that they had found three planets that could be Earth-like.

It was only after working with other major telescopes around the world including NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope that they were able to find all seven and determine what they were made of.

Why Is This A Big Deal?

Well any discovery of an exoplanet is a big deal because by very definition these are planets that share a similar composition to the planets we have in our own solar system.

What makes TRAPPIST-1 really special though can be summarised in three points:

1. This is the largest number of exoplanets that we have found orbiting a single star.

2. Three of these seven planets are right in the middle of what we call the ‘habitable zone’ which means that they are the right distance from a star to potentially support an atmosphere that could contain life.

3. Despite the fact only three are in the ‘habitable zone’ astronomers believe all seven planets could theoretically support liquid water on their surface.

So Are There Aliens On Any Of These Planets?

Well this is the ultimate question, and it’s one that we just don’t know at the moment.

As Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington said of the discovery: “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.”

While we’re still a long way from being able to say conclusively whether there is life in TRAPPIST-1 or not, the discovery of so many exoplanets so close to home confirms what many astronomers now believe: That there are a lot of planets out there and far more than we expected could have the environmental conditions needed to create life.

What TRAPPIST-1 does give us though is a chance to explore these planets close-up. 

“The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets,” said Nikole Lewis, co-leader of the Hubble study and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

What Are These Exoplanets Like?

The researchers who discovered them have described the planets as all being “rocky”.

What we also know is that because they’re all incredibly close to their host star.

That means that if you could stand on the surface of one of them the star in the sky would be 10x larger than our own Sun is.

You would also be able to see the other planets with incredible detail, possibly even making out atmospheric features like cloud formations.

Finally we know that they’re probably tidally locked. This means quite simply that they don’t rotate, so one side of the planet will be in permanent night and the other in permanent day.

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