And by ultra-cool stars I don’t mean the famous person-kind. I mean little itty-bitty stars. Stars so small that if they were any smaller, they wouldn’t be stars, they’d occupy a vague area between brown-dwarf object and super-jovian gas giant. But TRAPPIST-1 is just barely above the necessary mass to fuse hydrogen and that makes it a full-fledged star, albeit a very dim, very red one. But it’s not alone out there, 39 light-years away:
This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system. Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.
Seven planets around one little star, all probably terrestrial, and three are in the Goldilock’s Zone where liquid water could exist on their surfaces. Little stars like this make up about 15 percent of the observable objects near our sun and likely constitute a similar fraction in much of our galaxy. If lumped in with traditional red-dwarves like Proxima Centauri, they probably make up the majority of stars in the universe, and they can theoretically live upward of a trillion years. We strongly suspect Prox B has a terrestrial world in its habitable zone, now we have several more around an even smaller star. It may turn out that planets with oceans and life whirling around tiny dwarf stars are the rule, and planets like ours bathed in the light of a much larger, yellow-white suns might be the exception.
- Thank whatever deities you wish that not all billionaires are anti-science freaks. I was glad to see Elon Musk has, reportedly anyway, read and greatly valued Merchants of Doubt, by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes, which was favorably reviewed here on Daily Kos.
- OK, this isn’t science per se, but it needs to be said about one big difference between the 2009 tea party ruckus and the 2017 town-hall season. The tea partiers were yelling about made-up delusions. No one was going to pull the plug on Grandma, there was no government takeover of health care, there were no FEMA reeducation camps. Many of the people at town-halls today are terrified of losing their health care because they really will suffer and die if it is taken away.
- Let this be an anecdotal warning: I got sick right after I got a flu shot. If I didn’t have all that skeptical, objective training and known a little bit about how flu vaccines are made, it would have been real, real easy to blame the shot. It turned out to just be a garden-variety cold.
- You go, science!
The March for Science today announced its first round of partner organizations, including many leading scientific, academic, and educational institutions, among them, Earth Day Network (EDN), which will co-organize the national March for Science rally and teach-in in Washington, D.C. on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.