NASA Found 7 Earth-Sized Planets; Google Leads the Celebration

All your dreams about colonizing another planet and being a space explorer become a little more realistic as NASA finds seven new planets.

In my adolescence — you know, those formative years built upon re-runs of the X-Files and Doctor Who — I never once doubted that intelligent life existed beyond Earth. To me, it always seemed naive to assume that we were the only ones around in a galaxy that spans beyond what we can even comprehend. Space is so vast, we have to make up arbitrary arrangements of letters and numbers just to measure it.

Of course, we haven’t really found proof of intelligent life yet. (Well, if we have, the government wants to keep it under wraps. Also, please leave your best government conspiracy theories about aliens below in the comments. I’m dying for some extraterrestrial reading material.) But as of yesterday, NASA found 7 new planets that will give us another place to look.

Okay, that was my anecdote. Now, here’s the science:

Since the great “Planet Bonanza” of 2014, NASA continues to comb the galaxy for just about anything that’s not an asteroid. In 2014, the Kepler mission discovered 715 new worlds, 95% of which were four times the size of Earth. This “bonanza” (the actual scientific term from NASA) marks the last time we found a significant number of exoplanets.

As of yesterday, NASA found another exoplanet system. (Exoplanet means it’s outside our solar system. Which also means we’re not going to be putting humans there any time soon.) They named it TRAPPIST-1 and concluded that it was about 40 light-years away. And because NASA knows that most plebeians don’t understand light-years, they put that at about 235 trillion miles away from Earth. If only they’d convert that to football fields.

The TRAPPIST-1 star, an ultra-cool dwarf, has seven Earth-size planets orbiting it. This artist’s concept appeared on the cover of the journal Nature on Feb. 23, 2017.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Now NASA didn’t up and do it first, mind you. A research team in Chile, consisting of researchers from Belgium and NASA used the “The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope” to find find three new planets in May of last year. But combined with the help of European telescopes, NASA’s own Spitzer Space Telescope was able to confirm the existence of two of the aforementioned planets, then found an additional five.

So by NASA’s official count, there are 7 new planets. It’s a big deal because we’ve never found so many at once existing all around the same star.

And what’s more fascinating is that each planet is of similar density to Earth and because the new star (TRAPPIST-1, classification: ultra-cool dwarf) isn’t as hot as the Sun, it’s possible that the orbiting planets close to it have liquid water on their surface. According to NASA, all the planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 are closer than Mercury is in comparison to our Sun. (Mercury is the closest planet in our line-up, Earth is the third.)

What does that mean for us?

Basically, NASA has a lot of homework to do. At this point, they get to study how other planets operate at a density similar to Earth without sharing any other characteristics. For the most part, Earth sustains life for a variety of reasons, so NASA wants to know how many of these traits are shared with the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets. The best part is that a lot of the new planets may prove to be habitable … by what remains to be seen.

"The planets may also be tidally locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong winds blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes."

In today’s Google Doodle, an animated version of Earth can be seen looking through a telescope at “its seven friendly neighbors.”

I appreciate the use of the term “friendly,” but we still have a lot to learn. Think of it this way: Did you like The Martian or Interstellar better? One was a humorous Matt Damon movie, and the other was a really long, dramatic space epic. NASA and TRAPPIST-1 are just beginning their galactic courtship, with any sort of results still very far away.

Washington’s Science Mission Directorate associate administrator, Thomas Zurbuchen said as part of the release: “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.”

But for an idea of what it would feel like to stand on those planets, here, technology:

In the meantime, the Cigarette Smoking Man plans his recourse. He wonders how he’ll throw Mulder off his scent. As we all know, the truth is out there.

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