NASA Press Conference Wednesday on "Discovery Beyond our Solar System"

[Yazata]

NASA has scheduled a major press conference concerning a "Discovery Beyond our Solar System" for 1pm EST on Wednesday Feb 22 in Washington DC . Nature has a paper associated with whatever is to be announced, but it's embargoed until after the announcement. Nothing seems to have leaked about what the announcement is about. (How is that Possible in Washington DC?)

Here's the announcement:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-...lar-system

I wondered if I could perhaps figure out what this is about by examining the research areas of the participants.

One is a NASA administrator. Another is the guy in charge of the orbiting Spitzer space telescope at Cal Tech.

Another is Sara Seager of MIT who says that she is searching for "another earth" including signs of life by detection of "biosignature gases". If that's what this is about, it could be huge (or at least controversial).

http://www.saraseager.com/research/

Another one is Nikole Lewis of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins. Her research is once again into exoplanet atmospheric composition.

http://www.stsci.edu/~nlewis/

The last one is Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium. He also has an interest in the search for extraterrestrial life. His research concerns transiting exoplanets around small dwarf stars, detection of "super earths" and their physicochemical characterization.

http://reflexions.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_22687/...on-michael

This is going to be interesting.

Somehow I expect that's whatever is announced will be more disappointing than the discovery of "another earth" showing possible signs of life in its atmosphere. That's too much to hope for.

My guess/speculation is that they've found a rocky roughly earth-sized exoplanet with an atmosphere that might include oxygen. We'll know tomorrow.

[RainbowUnicorn]

NASA has scheduled a major press conference concerning a "Discovery Beyond our Solar System" for 1pm EST on Wednesday Feb 22 in Washington DC . Nature has a paper associated with whatever is to be announced, but it's embargoed until after the announcement. Nothing seems to have leaked about what the announcement is about. (How is that Possible in Washington DC?)

Here's the announcement:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-...lar-system

I wondered if I could perhaps figure out what this is about by examining the research areas of the participants.

One is a NASA administrator. Another is the guy in charge of the orbiting Spitzer space telescope at Cal Tech.

Another is Sara Seager of MIT who says that she is searching for "another earth" including signs of life by detection of "biosignature gases". If that's what this is about, it could be huge (or at least controversial).

http://www.saraseager.com/research/

Another one is Nikole Lewis of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins. Her research is once again into exoplanet atmospheric composition.

http://www.stsci.edu/~nlewis/

The last one is Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium. He also has an interest in the search for extraterrestrial life. His research concerns transiting exoplanets around small dwarf stars, detection of "super earths" and their physicochemical characterization.

http://reflexions.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_22687/...on-michael

This is going to be interesting.

Somehow I expect that's whatever is announced will be more disappointing than the discovery of "another earth" showing possible signs of life in its atmosphere. That's too much to hope for.

My guess/speculation is that they've found a rocky roughly earth-sized exoplanet with an atmosphere that might include oxygen. We'll know tomorrow.

A Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) about exoplanets will be held following the briefing at 3 p.m. with scientists available to answer questions in English and Spanish.

[Yazata]

I just watched the streamed press conference.

It concerns a red dwarf star called Trappist - 1. It was already known that it had 3 rocky planets. The announcement today is that 4 more exoplanets have been discovered in this system, bringing the total to 7. All of them are rocky planets roughly the same size as Earth, none are gas giants. And three of the planets are in the star's habitable zone. Conceivably all seven are, since the habitable zone isn't completely characterized and things like atmospheric greenhouse effects might have to be factored in.

The Trappist - 1 star is very small, only about 11% of the diameter and 8% of the mass of the sun and quite red and cool. The star's planetary system is very close to the star compared to our solar system. The planets' orbital periods (years) vary from 1.5 to 20 days. The innermost ones are probably tidally-locked to the star. All seven are closer to their star than the Earth is to the Sun.

It's unknown how old the system is, though minimum estimates are 1 billion years. Red dwarves are very long lived compared to the Sun, so it could be a lot more than that. But red dwarves can be unstable in their early phases, so it's unclear whether solar flares might have fried the planets and stripped them of atmospheres early in their histories. The star seems to be quiescent now.

The planets are crammed close to one another in their orbits and would only be about 2x the Earth-Moon distance at closest approach to each other. So from one of these planets, the other planets wouldn't just be dots of light in the sky like Venus, they would be discs like the Moon and perhaps even bigger. A very science-fictionish sky.

One of the questions asked was whether material could be transferred from one planet to another (that's been known to happen in our much larger solar system), making them one giant ecosystem assuming there's any life there. The answer was we don't know.

There's still no word on the planets' atmospheric composition or on whether they have signs of liquid water. That research is apparently awaiting the new James Webb space telescope to be lofted in a few years. It will include very powerful spectroscopes. The excitement is that this is a wonderful target system for the new telescope and it should be possible to get detailed chemical characterization of these new planets' atmospheres with the means that will soon be available.

I should probably say that being in a star's habitable zone doesn't necessarily mean that a planet is habitable. There are three planets in our solar system's inhabitable zone too, Venus, Earth and Mars. Venus is uninhabitable due to a run-away greenhouse effect, and Mars doesn't have enough greenhouse effect to make it warm enough for liquid water. (These exoplanets' larger Earthlike mass might help with that.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v54...21360.html

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/trappist1/

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1419/na...ngle-star/

[C C]

[...] bringing the total to 7. All of them are rocky planets roughly the same size as Earth, none are gas giants. And three of the planets are in the star's habitable zone. [...] The star's planetary system is very close to the star compared to our solar system. The planets' orbital periods (years) vary from 1.5 to 20 days. The innermost ones are probably tidally-locked to the star. All seven are closer to their star than the Earth is to the Sun. [...] The planets are crammed close to one another in their orbits and would only be about 2x the Earth-Moon distance at closest approach to each other. So from one of these planets, the other planets wouldn't just be dots of light in the sky like Venus, they would be discs like the Moon and perhaps even bigger. A very science-fictionish sky.

One of the questions asked is whether material could be transferred from one planet to another (that's been known to happen in our much larger solar system), making them one giant ecosystem assuming there's any life there. The answer was we don't know.

Given that so many extrasolar systems seem to have an aversion to substantiating any "typical pattern", I wonder how long we're going to keep clinging to our modern, prescriptive proverbs which resonate around Earth and the relationships and character of its neighborhood being ordinary, banal, non-special, etc. When figuratively striving for uniqueness seems to be a running goal of most of the stellar/planetary configurations.

[RainbowUnicorn]

i hope the bransons, gates and buffets of the world put tegether a large fund for our space station to build a massive super high tech telescope in orbit.
using a small orbital service vehicle that can be launched by soyuz and dock onto a cargo docking, then taxi out to a safe distance and build something super awesome..

[Yazata]

The James Webb Space Telescope launched flawlessly on a European Space Agency Ariane-5 rocket last Christmas.

In the year since then it's unfolded itself like a giant space origami and been very precisely tuned and calibrated. Since then among other tasks it's been observing the collection of seven Earth sized rocky planets in the Trappist-1 system. The planetary science people are still analyzing their data and should be announcing their results in 2023 sometime. I hope they have gotten some atmospheric composition information. At this point we don't know if any of them even have atmospheres.

In the meantime, here's a cute little Christmas thing from the JWST team. (Watch with the sound on.)

https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1605228621441941505