Astronomy / Space Nasa News - Discover Beyond Our Solar System

Cosmo

Cosmo
Repost of my comment of a closed thread: Trappist-1 is already in Space Engine. The guy added it in a few hours.

2W7TD8I.png


TRAPPIST-1 d is where things get exciting. Being a likely temperate terra with what seems to be liquid water and being "only" 40 light years away from us means this could be a home away from home for humanity.

http://imgur.com/gallery/ZtbBn
 

Y'Berion

Y'Berion
mossfoot said:
Actually it's more infrared than UV from what I heard in the press conference.
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I've been reading that M class dwarfs aren't very tame: flares and CMEs are much more frequent than with our Sun. Considering small distance from the star, it is very likely that the planets in Trappist-1 are receiving large amount of X and UV radiation which is destructive for planetary atmospheres and the life (at least the life as we know it).
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
And, no offence Sapporo, but that's the wrong star type. The star TRAPPIST-1 is a small M-class star, M8V to be precise; you've depicted it as a Class L brown dwarf.

So it'd look more like this:

L0KAGJK.jpg


Of course, with 3 ELW/terraformables this close to Earth, it's probably already colonized, Agricultural economy, with a large population, so no-one will get to Tag it... but one can dream...
 

Sapporo

Sapporo
Sapyx said:
And, no offence Sapporo, but that's the wrong star type. The star TRAPPIST-1 is a small M-class star, M8V to be precise; you've depicted it as a Class L brown dwarf.

So it'd look more like this:

http://i.imgur.com/L0KAGJK.jpg

Of course, with 3 ELW/terraformables this close to Earth, it's probably already colonized, Agricultural economy, with a large population, so no-one will get to Tag it... but one can dream...
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But...

Wikipedia said:
TRAPPIST-1, also designated 2MASS J23062928-0502285,[6] is an ultra-cool dwarf star[4][7] located 39.5 light-years (12.1 parsecs) from the Sun
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Ultra-cool dwarf?


PS: I did read the articles in details, didn't feel like making a "normal" looking map. A lot of ELW would be impressive :p
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
Y'Berion said:
I've been reading that M class dwarfs aren't very tame: flares and CMEs are much more frequent than with our Sun. Considering small distance from the star, it is very likely that the planets in Trappist-1 are receiving large amount of X and UV radiation which is destructive for planetary atmospheres and the life (at least the life as we know it).
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This is generally true. As a general rule, the smaller the star, the more violent the flares are, and at class M8, this star is one of the smaller ones. However, I'm thinking that, since this star isn't in any of the variable star catalogues (since it's got no variable star catalogue ID attached to it) I'm thinking this one actually might be quite stable, at least as far as recent human observations go. And even so, ED has plenty of ELWs, both natural and terraformed, around flare stars so in the ED universe at least, flares are not a barrier to habitability.

Life on a flare-star planet would certainly have to adapt, and Earth-life would need to be either coddled or genetically engineered in order to cope. On Medea, the collaborative-effort science fiction world orbiting a flare star, to which numerous authors contributed stories back in the 1970s, native life has two stages: "normal", where the lifeforms live out a pretty quiescent existence adapted to the low-energy red light of the star, and "flare", which causes a sudden and dramatic metamorphosis in most of the life-forms as they are forced to adjust to the brilliant white of the flare event.
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
CMDR Sapporo said:
But...

Ultra-cool dwarf?

PS: I did read the articles in details, didn't feel like making a "normal" looking map. A lot of ELW would be impressive :p
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True, perhaps, but this is ED. In ED, all Class M stars look much the same, whether they're M9 or M0, with a sharp change in appearance between M9 red dwarfs and L0 brown dwarfs.

If you click on "ultra coo dwarf" on the TRAPPIST-1 Wikipedia page, you'll see the technical definition: it includes any Class M star with a temperature under 2700 K.
 

Y'Berion

Y'Berion
Sapyx said:
ED has plenty of ELWs, both natural and terraformed, around flare stars so in the ED universe at least, flares are not a barrier to habitability.
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Well, in ED we also have ELWs thriving with life in orbits near neutron stars, so... yeah :)
 

Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
Yaffle
http://steamcommunity.com/games/elitedangerous/announcements/detail/583617921461769425

Greetings CMDRs,

Following the discovery of Trappist 1, we've been seeing a lot of discussions on the forums and reddit around this. We have some news and who better to deliver this than our own CEO David Braben? Take it away, David!

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The recent announcement of the discovery of the Trappist 1 system is exciting. The star, an M8 dwarf red star is right at the bottom end of the M class stars, so faint it is only just visible in the most powerful telescopes, and doesn’t feature in most star catalogues for this reason. Luckily, though, the system is almost exactly ‘edge on’ from our viewpoint – which means it is possible to ‘see’ the planets as they occlude the tiny star, and an incredible seven terrestrial planets have been spotted around the star by this technique, three of them in the ‘habitable zone’.

Even with Hubble, the fainter M class red stars are only just visible at 40 light years, which is why Trappist 1 is not in most of the star catalogues. Beyond this distance we can see ever fewer M class stars – particularly the fainter ones like this M8 – and it is where our procedural generation begins to kick in – supplementing the brighter, more visible stars.

The way Stellar Forge works is to use ‘available mass’ from which to generate systems – and because of this unaccounted mass, Stellar Forge has created a system with a Brown Dwarf in very nearly the same place – 39 light years away – this is only a little smaller than an M8 – and it even has seven terrestrial worlds around it – Core Sys Sector XU-P A5-0.

Interestingly the system that came out of Stellar Forge has a couple of moons, and a couple of co-orbiting binary pairs – these things would not (yet) be detected in the occlusion technique, as this is simply detecting the darkening of the stellar disc, but who knows, this might be possible.

Because of this we have tweaked Stellar Forge with the data from the recent discoveries so that the planets are now the same – and we have renamed it Trappist 1 – but the great thing is it is only a small tweak! We may still add a few moons back in, and this should go live in beta 2, and will of course be in 2.3 when it goes live to everyone.

David Braben
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