Discovery Of Exoplanets

NASA has discovered seven Earth-sized planets near a star. They are the hope that they could sustain life. Google represented the planets with a doodle too in the happy mood. TRAPPIST-1 is the transiting planets and planetesimals small telescope. A star was discovered in the Aquarius constellation 40 light years away from the Earth. All the seven planets circle the TRAPPIST-1 in orbits from one and a half to twenty days. Six Exoplanets have a temperature range of 0-100 degrees Celsius. Three of these planets are known to have water in the form of oceans. These planets are rocky and are sized same like Venus or Earth. All these planets are warm as the parent star is dim.

These TRAPPIST-1 planets are very close to each other and fit in the Mercury’s orbit to be precise. The heart star of this system is 200 times dimmer than the sun. The glow is red or salmon-colored.
Three exoplanets are in the habitable zone known as the Goldilocks zone. Here, the stellar energy is in the right amount. These planets are under scrutiny as no other star has seven earth-sized planets with favorable conditions. Studies are going on though to know about the living conditions.

The discovery was made using the NASA’s exoplanet hunting Spitzer space telescope. It uses the infrared ray technology, and the data gave them the weights, densities, and masses of the planets. The telescope has the same orbit of the earth and is functional till 2018. Exo-planet means a planet outside our solar system. Almost 3500 exoplanets were discovered till now, but none of them gave the hope of sustaining life on them. All the hopes are pinned on these seven planets now. Coming to the matter of TRAPPIST-1, it is an ultra-cool dwarf star maybe a bit larger than the planet Jupiter. Further studies will be made by the Hubble’s and James’s telescopes.