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Space

Most Earth-Like Planet Yet May Have Been Found Just 40 Light Years Away (sciencealert.com) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the twinkle-twinkle-little-earth dept.
One of the worlds in the TRAPPIST-1 system, a mere 40 light-years away, just might be clad in a life-supporting atmosphere," reports ScienceAlert.

"In exciting new JWST observations, the Earth-sized exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e shows hints of a gaseous envelope similar to our own, one that could facilitate liquid water on the surface." Although the detection is ambiguous and needs extensive follow-up to find out what the deal is, it's the closest astronomers have come yet in their quest to find a second Earth... [T]he first step is finding exoplanets that are the right distance from their host star, occupying a zone where water neither freezes under extreme cold nor evaporates under extreme heat. Announced in 2016, the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system was immediately exciting for this reason. The red dwarf star hosts seven exoplanets that have a rocky composition (as opposed to gas or ice giants), several of which are bang in the star's habitable, liquid water zone...

Red dwarf stars are also much more active than Sun-like stars, rampant with flare activity that, scientists have speculated, may have stripped any planetary atmospheres in the vicinity. Closer inspections of TRAPPIST-1d, one of the other worlds in the star's habitable zone, have turned up no trace of an atmosphere. But TRAPPIST-1e is a little more comfortably located, at a slightly greater distance from the star... [T]he spectrum is consistent with an atmosphere rich in molecular nitrogen, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.

This is pretty tantalizing. Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78 percent molecular nitrogen. If the results can be validated, TRAPPIST-1e might just be the most Earth-like exoplanet discovered to date. That is not a small if, though. Luckily, more JWST observations are in the pipeline, and the researchers should be able to validate or rule out an atmosphere very soon.
After analyzing four transits of TRAPPIST-1e across TRAPPIST-1, "We are seeing two possible explanations," says astrophysicist Ryan MacDonald of the University of St Andrews in the UK. "The most exciting possibility is that TRAPPIST-1e could have a so-called secondary atmosphere containing heavy gases like nitrogen. "But our initial observations cannot yet rule out a bare rock with no atmosphere..."

Astrophysicist Ana Glidden of MIT led the second team interpreting the results, and says "We are really still in the early stages of learning what kind of amazing science we can do with Webb. It's incredible to measure the details of starlight around Earth-sized planets 40 light-years away and learn what it might be like there, if life could be possible there."

"We're in a new age of exploration that's very exciting to be a part of."

Most Earth-Like Planet Yet May Have Been Found Just 40 Light Years Away More | Reply

Most Earth-Like Planet Yet May Have Been Found Just 40 Light Years Away

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  • "Just" 40 lightyears away? (Score:3)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Sunday September 14, 2025 @10:40AM (#65658942)

    Wake me up when we get to the moon.

    • Re:"Just" 40 lightyears away? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday September 14, 2025 @10:45AM (#65658950)

      Wake me up when we get to the moon.

      Oh boy, do I have GREAT news for you!: Apollo 11: the first moon landing [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For all intensive porpoises, 40 light years or 40,000,000 light years, it's all the same. It is unreachable. The Fermi Paradox is not a paradox at the all. The universe is so vast that interstellar travel simply is not possible.

      For example, at 10 times the speed of light (which is not even possible according to our understanding of the laws of physics) it would take 2,600 years to reach the center of our galaxy and 250,000 years to reach Andromeda.
      • I want to debate that thought. Does a photon experience distance or time? or... Does it simply jump from atom to atom instantaneously millions or billions of light years away? From a photons point of view, does it really travel anywhere? Some experiments show that light doesn't exist unless we look at it.

        • Does a photon experience distance or time?

          No, photons are sentient and don't "experience" anything.

          or... Does it simply jump from atom to atom instantaneously millions or billions of light years away?

          Photons do not require a medium for travel. Therefore, they do not "jump from atom to atom"

          From a photons point of view, does it really travel anywhere?

          A tree that falls in the woods does indeed make a sound, so yes.

          Some experiments show that light doesn't exist unless we look at it.

          Reddit threads don't count as experiments.

        • Some experiments show that light doesn't exist unless we look at it.

          No experiments show that. Its just a strange interpretation of certain features of photons. But to be clear that doesnt mean "the photon is not real", rather it shows probabilistic properties under specific circumstances. Strange does not mean fake.

          as for whether it 'experiences' time. Well thats a complex question. Due to time dilation , from *its* inertial frame, one would things happen pretty much instantly, it is effectively always at t

      • Indeed, "accelerating a space ship" is no way to get anywhere. What we need is to figure out how to open up holes in the warp so we can transport ships into and out of it. Travelling short distances through the warp equates to enormous distances in normal space. Though navigation through it is difficult, and the exposure to chaos can cause insanity or encounters with demons. So, we will need to develop defenses against those things as well.

      • objects that are 40 ly away are potentially easier to see with detail than if it's 40M ly away. Assuming there are no gas clouds in the way.

      • For all intensive porpoises, 40 light years or 40,000,000 light years, it's all the same. It is unreachable. .

        40 light years is perfectly "reachable" by a civilization that wants to get there. You just have to give up on the idea that it's reachable by you or me personally.

        At a speed of .01c (difficult but probably achievable), it's a mere 4000 years away. Earth has had life for 3.5 billion years, and has had some version of "homo sapiens" for 300,000 years. With luck, the Earth may be able to support life for another 500 million years, maybe longer. There's plenty of time to putter back and forth to Trappist-1

  • In cosmological scales that is very close. However, in human scales this is unreachable. We need drastic extension of life, or suspended animation, or new physics that would allow for FTL travel.

    • You should know better. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday September 14, 2025 @11:41AM (#65658988)

      However, in human scales this is unreachable. We need drastic extension of life, or suspended animation, or new physics that would allow for FTL travel.

      This is incorrect. The passengers on a spaceship traveling at relativistic velocity will experience time differently. From inside the spaceship, it will seem like everything outside is speeding up but time is relative and compared to the outside, they are slowing down. Therefore, space travel under constant acceleration [wikipedia.org] could enable someone to travel beyond the observable universe in a human lifetime while (depending on your rate of acceleration) billions of years have passed outside the spaceship.

      Naturally, an amazing energy source to provide the thrust will be required. Antimatter/matter reactions look like a possible method for at least some distances. I'm not saying it's a solved problem, I'm saying it's not impossible to accomplish in a human lifetime.

      • Great theory- constant acceleration at the rate your talking about is about the same as perpetual motion. It is impossible for current engineering capabilities

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by ndsurvivor ( 891239 )
          I read the wikipedia entry, my main take away is that if a ship could accelerate at a rate of earths gravity, it would be a comfy ride. It could accelerate for half of the distance, and decelerate for the other half. Gravity would feel like it is on earth. There is no difference between gravity and acceleration. It would still take thousands of years to go 40 light years.
          • There is no difference between gravity and acceleration.

            I'm not a physicist, and I don't know if a physicist would agree with you completely. I do know, however, that any effect that you can create with acceleration you can also create with gravity, and vice versa.

          • It would still take thousands of years to go 40 light years.

            That's how time would pass on Earth, for the people moving at relativistic speed it would be more like decades. It all depends on the acceleration, of course. If the acceleration was close to Earth gravity then the time passing on Earth would be more like centuries than millennia, if I'm reading the chart on the Wikipedia page correctly.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Actually about 7.2 years ship time and just over 42 years Earth time, quicker if you don't want to stop at the end. Takes about a year at 1G to get close to light speed and really take advantage of relativistic time compression.
            Of course the energy requirements would be huge and current physics says it is close to impossible.

      • It seems to me that only after achieving 0.999999c that time would kind of stop for the persons on the ship and time around them would appear to going at a rate of billions of years while an hour or two would pass for you. At that point, the equations show that the ship would be approaching an infinite mass, and it would take an infinite amount of energy to 'bump' them up to the speed of light.

        • âoeTau Zeroâ by Poul Anderson

          Itâ(TM)s a good sci fi story around this topic

          • I read the wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. It seems like a great story. It seems to track Einsteins equations, and I love the twist on how billions of years pass in a moment for them, and the "big crunch" and a new "big bang" happens. I think that is how things will unfold simply because I think everything seems circular. I read a lot of Asimov stories, that writer seems similar. Thanks for the reference, I will check later if I can get an audible book. I have a ha

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          You can't reach the speed of light, just get closer and closer. Takes about a year at 1G to really get the relativistic effects at close to light speed.
          Problem is everything you hit, even light, has so much energy that survival would be, lets say hard. The energy requirements make it impossible according to current physics.

      • Sadly there is a rarely mentioned difficulty. Constant acceleration requires exponentially increasing amounts of fuel with time. Even with matter / antimatter as a fuel, its difficult to imagine getting a relativistic time contraction of more than a a factor of a few. (remember you need to decelerate at the far end which requires another exponential factor in fuel). Antimatter propulsion also has other difficulties, in both creation and storage. The creation of anti-protons is inefficient, there is a

        • Constant acceleration requires exponentially increasing amounts of fuel with time.

          No it doesn't. In fact, it's the exact opposite.

          Constant acceleration only requires constant thrust, so the exact same amount of fuel consumed per time interval. That is true is the ship's total mass remains constant.

          But in fact, the ship's mass will not remain constant. It will decrease with time, because of the fuel consumed. Therefore, to maintain constant acceleration, the ship will need to produce a decreasing amount of thrust with time, because of the decrease in mass, thus requiring less and less fue

          • Re:You should know better. (Score:5, Informative)

            by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Sunday September 14, 2025 @04:43PM (#65659342)

            Its the standard rocket equation (as viewed in the frame of the rocket). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            In the non-relativistic case, if you need a delta-V that is larger than the fuel exhaust velocity, you need to carry an amount of fuel that grows exponentially with that ratio. (see above). In the relativistic case, its similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
            What is going on is that you need to accelerate not just the rocket , but the mass of the fuel that you will need for future acceleration. Start with the rocket mass. To apply thrust for acceleration * time = exhaust velocity, you need a factor of e in fuel mass. If you want to double your speed you need to do that again, so you need e*e mass ratio. And so on.

            You can do the math, or write a simple program - just take small steps and work in the comoving frame of the rocket so that you can ignore relativistic effects.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          I read somewhere that even totally annihilating a gram of matter/antimatter only gives enough energy to accelerate a gram of matter to 50% light speed, assuming perfectly using the energy. How to harness the gamma rays is unknown.
          Basically current physics says getting to relativistic speeds is close to impossible.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        However, in human scales this is unreachable. We need drastic extension of life, or suspended animation, or new physics that would allow for FTL travel.

        This is incorrect. The passengers on a spaceship traveling at relativistic velocity will experience time differently. From inside the spaceship, it will seem like everything outside is speeding up but time is relative and compared to the outside, they are slowing down. Therefore, space travel under constant acceleration [wikipedia.org] could enable someone to travel beyond the observable universe in a human lifetime while (depending on your rate of acceleration) billions of years have passed outside the spaceship.

        Naturally, an amazing energy source to provide the thrust will be required. Antimatter/matter reactions look like a possible method for at least some distances. I'm not saying it's a solved problem, I'm saying it's not impossible to accomplish in a human lifetime.

        So... We can start planning the invasion of this planet next week?

      • The passengers on a spaceship traveling at relativistic velocity will experience time differently.

        So to the passengers, it may just be a couple of years... but entire civilizations would rise and fall before the travelers ended up at their destination. The planet they came from might not even have humans on it before they arrive at their destination.

    • The problem getting there with real physics isn't so much the length of life, but the amount of energy you need to speed up to get there and then brake.

      Whatever "new physics" we might discover, it won't change the conclusions of the laws we already know, including the required energy and the inability to go faster than light.

      So, yes, 4 or 40, when "light years" comes into play it is meaningless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      No, this is close enough to where we wouldn't need FTL which is what makes this interesting since as far as we know FTL is impossible. If we were certain this planet was habitable (a big "if") a ship capable of producing its own air and food and whatnot would be practical with a fast enough drive, it would just take a few generations. Unlike FTL It's something that seems plausible for us to be doing in a couple hundred years.

  • While it may seem foolish to bother observing far away planets like this due to our lack of ability to reach them, one should remember that humanity has always had seemingly unobtainable goals that we have always dreamed of reaching. Despite the distant nature of our goals, things like this inspire us to expand our capabilities and strive to "reach for the stars".

    Despite being mere fantasy for millennia, humanity has made amazing progress to reaching the goals of humanity which seem to be fundamental to hum

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Whatever progress humanity has made so far has followed the laws of physics, for the obvious reason.

      We're not much closer to immortality than we were in Egyptian times - maximum lifespan is about the same.

      We're not close to "building an artificial person" than we were in Egyptian times. The bullshit of "AGI" is nothing more than a cheap trick to swindle some inheritance and tax-free money.

      All traveling to alien lands that we've done has been done either on Earth, where the conditions are roughly the same ev

      • I have a theory, that in the future we can plug a DNA sequence into a computer and we can "grow" a virtual human, and let it live in a virtual environment surrounded by plants and animals. That it can eat, sleep, and poop in a virtual environment. There may be no difference between a meatsack and a virtual human. At that point, they (we) could explore the universe by tweaking the code, and if in "real life" we ever make radio contact with an alien species, we just need their DNA sequences and cultural i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      humanity has always had seemingly unobtainable goals

      Our reach should exceed our grasp.*

      *Or why else have a four foot rule at the strip club?

  • I love astronomy trying to be relevant in the every day personâ(TM)s mind. It would take 61 Thousand years for the fastest spacecraft we have ever produced to get there. That is longer then all human documented history. So close and yet so so so far away
  • Definitely read about TRAPPIST-1 years, if not decades ago, iirc
  • So I hear they've found a spare planet for us to live on, so we need not worry about destroying this one. That's the message, right? :-)
  • that O2 was not detected. When photosynthesis first occurred on Earth, it released O2, and I guess it took about a Billion years for the iron that was 'laying around' to bind with the O2 to create rust, or Iron Oxide. We see it in the Earths crust as a thick layer that was formed a few Billion years ago. Then more complex organisms could emerge because O2 is a potent energy source for biology. Is my understanding.
  • What is 240 trillion miles between friends?
  • Ark 1 went there, yeah 3rd season coming in 2026: https://youtu.be/7suLZQTejaA?s... [youtu.be]
  • So, even with a ship capable of the ridiculous speed of the Parker Solar Probe, around a 61,000 year journey one-way. Pointless science. I hope we divert tax dollars to better things.
  • I can hardly wait until a religious group builds a colony ship, fills it with their most dedicated adherents, and sends it off-world.
  • 1'081'679 years to get there if we travel at the fast speed a human has ever acheived.

  • Admiral Ackbar: "It's a trappist!"

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