The best telescopes will unveil the planets, stars and galaxies in the night sky. The team's research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint version is posted on the paper repository arXiv. Each one of these planets is truly precious." "There are only a handful of stellar systems where we have the opportunity to look for these sorts of atmospheres. "With TRAPPIST-1, we have a really great opportunity to see what an Earth-sized planet around a red dwarf would look like," Howard said. James Webb Space Telescope could help hunt for habitable alien worlds The TRAPPIST-1 solar system not bombarded by space rocks like early Earth, study suggests Exoplanets in the Trappist-1 system more likely to be habitable than scientists once thought, study suggests This new breakthrough should allow astronomers to get an even clearer picture of the conditions around the planets of this fascinating system. A recent study of one of those planets, TRAPPIST-1b, revealed that it seems to lack an atmosphere. JWST is already starting to investigate the atmospheres of the TRAPPIST-1 worlds. Not only do these planets seem to be rocky like Earth, but three of them exist in the habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1, the region in which it is neither too hot nor cold to allow water to exist as a liquid on a world's surface - a vital condition for life as we know it. The fascination with the system in the astronomical community intensified with the discovery of a further four planets around the red dwarf star, itself discovered in 1999. TRAPPIST-1 has been a tantalizing target for astronomers since three planets were first discovered around the red dwarf star in 2016. What makes TRAPPIST-1 a prime target for scientists? This method could be key for obtaining clearer images of planetary atmospheres and will likely be applied to the TRAPPIST-1 system in particular, the researchers said. "If you don't account for flares, you could detect molecules in the atmosphere that aren't really there or get the amount of material in the atmosphere wrong," Howard explained.Īdditionally, not only was the team able to observe a stellar flare in certain wavelengths of infrared light for the first time with JWST, but they also captured the evolution of those four flares in detail, watching over several hours as they grew in brightness before peaking and becoming dim again. They then separated these bursts of light from the regular light coming from the star, filtering out around 80% of the flare-based radiation. Howard and his colleagues addressed this challenge by observing flares emerging from TRAPPIST-1 over a period of roughly 27 hours. Astronomers study alien atmospheres by observing light as it passes through them, and chaotic emissions of stellar radiation complicate this process. The violent activity of red dwarfs makes studying the atmospheres of their exoplanets a challenge. Our own sun, by contrast, erupts with similar outbursts just once a month or so. TRAPPIST-1 emits powerful blasts of energy as flares several times a day. Red dwarfs like the Jupiter-sized TRAPPIST-1, which has a mass around 9% that of the sun, are the most common stars in the Milky Way and, despite their small stature, are also the most active. Related: James Webb Space Telescope finds no atmosphere on Earth-like TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet
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