Posted on 01/24/2018 11:42:04 AM PST by Red Badger
According to a new study in Astronomy & Astrophysics, water could be common among the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
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The quest continues to learn more about the TRAPPIST-1 system, seven roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting a dwarf star about 39 light-years away. Whether life could exist on these planets is a matter of speculation at the moment, but scientists are honing in on measurements that could tell us if some of these alien worlds are habitable.
The planets are rocky and some are the correct distance from their host star for liquid water, but they are probably tidally locked with the star, meaning the same hemisphere of the planet always faces the star, casting one half in perpetual daylight. In addition, they orbit much closer to TRAPPIST-1 than the planets of our solar system orbit the sun—in fact, the TRAPPIST-1 planets all orbit much closer to their host star than even Mercury to the sun. To make matters even more tenuous, stars like TRAPPIST-1, ultracool dwarf stars, are known to eject flares and supercharged particles at a high rate during their early years, possibly bombarding any planets with radiation and stripping away their atmospheres.
But there is some good news for those who hope our TRAPPIST-1 neighbors harbor life. A new study to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics refined measurements for the mass and radius of the planets, and for the first time measured the amount of energy in the planets' interiors from tidal heating, which is energy generated by the gravitational tug of the star and other planets. The research suggest that two of the planets in particular, the third and fourth from the star, simply called TRAPPIST-1 d and e, have enough energy from tidal forces to sustain volcanic activity and significant amounts of water.
NASA/JPL-CALTECH
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"I think it's likely that planets d and e could have surface water in some places," Amy Mlinar, a planetary scientist with the Planetary Science Institute and lead author of the new study, told Popular Mechanics in an email. "Planet e is the most interesting to me, because its surface temperature is quite close to the melting point of ice—portions of the surface could be at just the right temperature for interesting ice tectonics and/or volcanism."
Mlinar, who specializes in the study of rocky planets and their formation, says that recent Hubble Space Telescope observations that suggest the TRAPPIST-1 planets could have water—as measured by the amount of UV light they receive and how much hydrogen they vent into space as a result—support her team's findings that "some of the planets may still have significant water close to their surfaces."
"Planet d has enough tidal heating to have a warm interior and potentially some volcanic eruptions on the surface of its rock layer," says Mlinar. "This, coupled with the warm surface temperature, leads us to believe that planet d could be habitable." The same goes for planet e, she says.
Another important calculation was made in the new study to estimate the extent of the greenhouse effect on the TRAPPIST-1 planets. A runaway greenhouse state could generate a thick atmosphere around the planets and heat the surfaces to conditions unfavorable to life, but the team found planets d and e were unlikely to be in runaway greenhouse states.
Planet c—the second closest to the star, as 'TRAPPIST-1 a' is the star itself—has also attracted interest among planetary scientists. The TRAPPIST-1 system is quite similar to the Jovian system of Jupiter and its moons. The planets, though much larger than Jupiter's moons, orbit at about the same distance to TRAPPIST-1 and at roughly the same rate. The Planetary Science Institute study suggests that planet c in particular could be similar to Jupiter's moon Io, with highly active volcanism at the surface and even permanently flowing surface lavas.
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Exactly what these planets are like is still unknown, and the likelihood that they are tidally locked results in a few possibilities. Without substantial atmospheres, the tidal locking would mean the light and dark halves of the planets would look very different, with possible water or volcanoes on the day side but likely cold ice and rock on the night side. With significant atmospheres, however, the planets could circulate much of their tidal energy to the dark side, and you would get a more uniform world with possible activity on both sides.
We do not yet have a satisfactory answer regarding whether any of the TRAPPIST-1 planets have a significant atmosphere, however. A recent study suggested that some of the farther planets could have avoided the worst of TRAPPIST-1's radiation and clung on to their atmospheres, including planet e. But to find out for sure, astronomers will need more powerful telescopes.
Fortunately, a number are in the works. One of the primary missions of the James Webb Space Telescope, tentatively scheduled to launch next year, will be to study the atmospheres of exoplanets with its powerful infrared imaging capabilities. Ground-based observatories coming online in the 2020s will also focus on studying the atmospheres of exoplanets to look for signs of habitability, including the Giant Magellan Telescope and Extremely Large Telescope that will be constructed in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and the Thirty Meter Telescope that will sit on the Mauna Kea volcano of Hawaii.
Just 10 years ago, the abundance of exoplanets in the galaxy was assumed, but only a few hundred planets had actually been found. Now astronomers have discovered thousands, and many more are detected every year. Studying these mysterious worlds for signs of habitability has become one of the primary focuses of astronomy and planetary science, and the TRAPPIST-1 planets are close enough and similar enough to Earth that scientists won't rest until we know what dwells there, be it rocks, water, or organisms.
ALL THESE PLANETS ARE CLOSER TO THEIR STAR THAN MERCURY IS TO OURS.....................SEE BOTTOM PIC...............
EXOPLANET PING!...................
OOOOOOR, they could not.
Of course water could be common. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and oxygen is the third most common element in the universe so who could be stupid enough to think that it is rare anywhere but here. Water will be water here, on Jupiter’s moons, in comets, so by extrapolation how far do you have to go before water isn’t there anymore? And since carbon is the fourth most common element in the universe, it stands to reason that carbon dioxide and methane will be very common as well.
Planet Earth has earthlings.
Planet Mars would have martians.
Planet e has......eepers?
Mars Needs Women.
It says they’re tidally locked such that you have a permanent hot side and a permanent cold side. But you also have permanent shadow zones. Where you could grow barley. And hops. Yes. This could be the mythical Planet Of Beer.
And another thing, planets are not internally heated by tidal forces, they are heated by decay of unstable heavy elements.
Don’t we all.
Trappist 1 is an ultra cool red dwarf of about 0.09 solar masses, just a bit over the minimum for a proton-proton reaction, and a surface temperature of about 2500K.
Since this is a red dwarf, it can have the tendency to flare frequently. Not being a physicist or cosmologist (I’m just an engineer), I suspect that low mass stars that are fully convective may also tend to do a good amount of flaring.
North Korean Flair: 
these jackwagons, always with the “could”s and “may”s.
Please give us some real science.
Nobody needs that movie.
I figured that when I saw how short their orbital periods were in the other chart.
They could be wrong, though.
For decades they told us Mercury was ‘tidally locked’ and only one side faced the Sun, then they found out they were wrong. It turns, slowly, but it turns.....................
Wouldn’t that tidal locking create a massive thermal differential, and result in hurricane winds?
If there’s an atmosphere................
“Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and oxygen is the third most common element in the universe so who could be stupid enough to think that it is rare anywhere but here. “
The facts you mention while suggesting conditions for combining hydrogen and oxygen into water may exist with exo-planets in other solar systems, it is that combining of the two elements, and the conditions for it, which may NOT BE so abundant in the universe. If the mere existence of how much hydrogen and oxygen go to make up the known gases in the universe was the COMMON AND ESSENTIAL ingredient for estimating how often water “ought to be” present, then it would certainly be more present even in our own solar system than empirical science has determined so far.
Just take our own planet and what is described as key factors that make its ability to contain water - distance from our star and other factors, yet scientists still debate whether water was present in what went to make up the earth from the solar disk, or if it arrived early in the course of earth history from asteroids and other bodies that pelted the early earth. And none of the scientists on either side of that debate argue that water is here merely because of how “common” are hydrogen and oxygen.
Sure a lot of assumptions in this article.
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