Three Potentially Habitable Planets Have Been Found in Our Cosmic Backyard

Artist’s render of the TRAPPIST-1 system. Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The search for potentially life-bearing exoplanets got a hefty boost this Monday, with the discovery of three Earth-sized worlds orbiting an ultracool dwarf star only 39 light years distant from our own solar system.

By Becky Ferreira | MOTHERBOARD

The planets, described today in Nature, are such close cosmic neighbors that astronomers expect to root out precise details about their masses, atmospheres, chemical makeup, and thermal structure—as well as their potential habitability—with future observations.

“[With] the measurement of the masses, we should have enough information to constrain the surface conditions, notable to assess the existence of liquid water,” Michaël Gillon, astronomer at the Université de Liège and lead author of the new research, told me via email.

“The most exciting part is, of course, that these observations could also reveal chemical disequilibria originating from biological activity,” he continued.

In other words, astronomers hope to detect “biomarkers” such as oxygen, ozone, methane, or other substances that might have been produced by extraterrestrial life. While many of these markers can also be produced by non-biological processes, these three alien worlds are close enough to be studied with much greater scrutiny than most exoplanets, so it will be easier to pick up finer details about their habitability.

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