Strange life in the new solar system discovered

The new TRAPPIST-1 solar system that NASA has just discovered has 7 planets similar in size to Earth and with temperatures suitable for life. So how will life on these planets be different from life on Earth?

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Wonderful night sky view

If you stand on one of the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the most spectacular thing you can see is the other six planets in the sky. In some cases, a neighboring planet can be twice the size of a full moon seen from Earth.

“You won’t see these planets like we see Venus or Mars, which are just specks of light in the sky,” said Michael Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium. “You’ll see the planets like we see the Moon. You’ll see the structures of these worlds.”

An imaginary journey to TRAPPIST-1.

All seven planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system orbit closer to their star than Mercury orbits the Sun. The innermost and outermost planets are 30 times closer to Earth than Earth and Venus are at their farthest distances.

The reason these seven planetary siblings can orbit in such a tight orbit is because their host star is an ultra-cool dwarf. It is 2,000 times dimmer than the Sun and only slightly larger than Jupiter.

Three of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system orbit the star in what’s called the “habitable zone,” or the area around a star where a planet could have surface temperatures suitable for liquid water. The location of this habitable zone varies from star to star. On a very dim star like TRAPPIST-1, which radiates much less heat than the Sun, the habitable zone lies much closer to the star.

But there’s no guarantee that a planet in TRAPPIST-1’s habitable zone would have liquid water on its surface. On comets, for example, ice “sublimates” directly into vapor, rather than liquid, when heated by the sun.

Always "twilight"

Although the seven planets of TRAPPIST-1 orbit extremely close to their host star, the natural light on these planets appears very faint to humans.

Fantasy life on a new planet.

Ultracool dwarf stars produce much less heat than stars like the Sun, and most of TRAPPIST-1's light is emitted in infrared wavelengths rather than visible wavelengths.

TRAPPIST-1 would be able to warm the air on the surface of the seven planets, but the daytime sky would not be brighter than the sky on Earth after sunset, leaving the world on this system in a pinkish-orange twilight.

The year is short, the days are endless

The TRAPPIST-1 planets take almost no time to orbit their host star. Six of the planets complete a full orbit in anywhere from 1.5 to 12.4 days. The most distant planet completes its orbit in just 20 days.

That means a “year” on most of these planets is equivalent to less than 2 weeks on Earth.

However, the orbital phase of these planets is “disturbed” by their neighbors.

“The planets ‘pull’ each other as they orbit the star,” Sean Carey, director of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center in Pasadena, California, said at a NASA press conference on February 22. As a result, they change their orbital time slightly.

Although the years in the TRAPPIST-1 system are shorter, the days would be very long, almost endless. This is because the planets are “tidally locked,” meaning that the same side of each planet always faces the host star. The moon is “tidally locked” to Earth.

Some tidally locked planets could be habitable because the side facing the host star would be extremely hot, while the other side would be extremely cold.

However, some models suggest that a planet's atmosphere could absorb some of the heat on its surface, allowing life to survive.

According to VNN