TRAPPIST-1 system tagged posts

If there were such a thing as a photo album of the universe, it might include snapshots of pancake-like disks of gas and dust, swirling around newly formed stars across the Milky Way. Known as planet-forming disks, they are believed to be a short-lived feature around most, if not all, young stars, providing the raw materials for planets to form.

Most of these planetary nurseries are short-lived, typically lasting only about 10 million years—a fleeting existence by cosmic standards. Now, in a surprising find, researchers at the University of Arizona have discovered that disks can grace their host stars much longer than previously thought, provided the stars are small—one-tenth of the sun’s mass or less.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Letters Journal, a research tea...

1. The lighter green indicates optimistic regions of the habitable zone and the darker green denotes more conservative limits.
Credit: University of Oklahoma
2. This artist’s impression displays TRAPPIST-1 and its planets reflected in a surface. Image credit: NASA / R. Hurt / T. Pyle.
3. The TRAPPIST-1 system contains a total of seven Earth-size planets. Three of them — TRAPPIST-1e, f and g — dwell in their star’s so-called ‘habitable zone.’ Image credit: NASA

A University of Oklahoma post-doctoral astrophysics researcher, Billy Quarles, has identified the possible compositions of the 7 planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system...