The Basics Of The New Planet Discoveries
Credit: UConn Today
In case you have yet to hear, scientists have discovered seven (!!) new planets! The coolest thing about these planets is that they closely resemble Earth, in both size and habitat. It is still unclear as to whether or not these plants could hold human life, but it’s looking pretty good that one or more of them could be habitable for us.
These seven planets are orbiting around a dwarf star called Trappist-1, which is pretty cool considering that’s a similar layout to what we have here in our own solar system. It’s pretty uncommon to find this many planets also orbiting a sun. These planets are approximately 40 light years (or 235 trillion miles) away from us, but apparently in cosmic terms this is a relatively close distance. To me, this sounds like a huge distance away since driving like 30 miles is enough for me.
In my personal opinion, the coolest thing about these new discoveries is that it (almost) proves that aliens are real and out there. There are so many planets out there it’d be crazy for me to believe that there are no other life forms apart from us, but scientists believe that these new planet discoveries have been a, “crucial step toward finding if there is life out there.” Which, like, guys this is so cool!! Or terrifying, depending on how you look at it. All of the researchers on the team who discovered these planets think the discoveries are really promising for discovering aliens.
Thanks to improvements in technology, we’re (or at least these scientists are) able to discover even more planets and stars out there. They have even been able to figure out that Trappist-1 is actually very small compared to our own sun; about eight percent of the size of our sun. “...Dr. Gillon gave a simple analogy: If our sun were the size of a basketball, Trappist-1 would be a golf ball.” The planets themselves are also a bit different than those in our solar system. They circle their star much faster than our planets do; the fastest planet completes an orbit in just 1.5 days, while the slowest takes only 20 days. Scientists say that this makes them more closely related to the moons of Jupiter than our own solar system.
The discovery of these new planets and new star is such an amazing discovery for the world. It is finally seeming possible that aliens are out there and existing on their own planets. Which, like I said before, is both cool and a little terrifying. It’s also really cool to see just how much our technology has improved over the past several decades, and it is exciting to see where it’ll go in the future.
Written by @melania