Following after the recent revelation made by NASA about the discovery the new seven Earth-like planets, dubbed as TRAPPIST-1 start system, experts say that these while planets appear to be rocky, it also has a life-friendly surface temperature, which is seen to have the potential in harboring liquid water. That said, this discovery has then led a significant number of scientists to give it a nickname as a 'sister solar system' to our own, and is regarded as being a pretty good spot to look for extraterrestrial life. Today, these additional data about TRAPPIST-1 from Kepler that are made available to the scientific community, is what excites and baffles a number of space experts as to whether how habitable these planets could really be, considering the stellar activity of the dwarf star that they're orbiting.
Raw Data From Our Sister Solar System
According to reports revealed by Science Alert, the truth is, until we get a closer look, no one can truly say for sure whether or not life could be supported somewhere in the star system; which has also been the reason that NASA has allegedly rushed out data from its latest and longest observations of TRAPPIST-1 to date. It was found that since December of 2016, NASA revealed that it had its own planet-hunting Kepler space telescope that has been trained on TRAPPIST-1 for follow-up observations. Concurrently, this week, NASA authorities have made all that additional data freely available to the scientific community and public to trawl through.
In one of his statements reported by SpaceRef, Geert Barentsen, a K2 research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California has claimed that scientists and enthusiasts all over the world are already investing in learning everything they can about these Earth-size worlds. Experts say that the release of the raw, uncalibrated data that has been collected will help astronomers in preparing proposals that are due this month in order to use telescopes on Earth next winter to further investigate TRAPPIST-1, wherein by late May, it was anticipated that the routine processing of the data will be completed and the fully calibrated data will be made available at the public archive. Meanwhile, the early release would be able to allegedly give scientists the opportunity to get more insight into the gravitational interaction between the planets which could potentially serve as a clue to whether any of them are tidally locked, as well as the chance to spot any planets that may remain undiscovered in the system.
Kepler's K2 Campaign
Furthermore, it was found that the added refinements to the previous measurements of the known planets and any additional planets that may be discovered in the K2 data will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies of the neighboring TRAPPIST-1 worlds using NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Ultimately, the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is believed to be powerful enough to actually detect the atmospheric composition of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
