Photo: NASA / Getty Images
By: EFE
Friday, September 20
The enigma surrounding the seven Earth-sized planets that are 40 light years away
Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the so-called TRAPPIST-1 system in near perfect harmony , which American and European researchers have used to determine the amount of “physical abuse” that they could have endured in their training, according to a study released Thursday.
“After the rocky planets formed, some matter slammed into them,” says astrophysicist Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux (France).
The phenomenon “is called bombardment or late addition, and we care, in part, because these impacts can be a major source of water and volatile elements that stimulate life. ”
In the study published in Nature Astronomy, Raymond and a group of colleagues from the Clever Planets project – founded by NASA – at Rice University and seven other institutions, used a computer model of the “bombardment” phase of the planet formation in TRAPPIST-1 in order to explore the impacts that their planets could have endured without being out of that harmony.
“Deciphering the impact of the history of the planets is difficult in the solar system and could seem like a task hopeless in systems that are light years away “, admits Raymond.
The expert recalls that certain types of elements can be measured on Earth and compared with meteorites: “That is what we do to try to find out how much matter hit the Earth after it had been formed mostly. ”
According to the study, there are no tools to study the aforementioned“ bombardment ”on exoplanets and note that it is “This is where the special orbital configuration of TRAPPIST-1 enters” .
TRAPPIST-1 is a star located about 27 light years, it is much smaller and colder than the Sun , and its planets are named alphabetically from B to H according to the order of their distance from the star. The time required to complete an orbit around the star – equivalent to one year on Earth – is 1.5 days on planet B and 19 on planet H.
“We cannot say exactly how much matter crashed on any of these planets, but due to their special configuration, we can set a limit “, says the expert.
Researchers found that after these planets formed, they were not “bombarded” by more than a very small number of things, a fact that the experts considered “interesting information when taking into account other aspects of the planets in the system.”
Planets grow within disks of protoplanetary gas and dust around newly formed stars . These discs only last a few million years, and according to Raymond, previous research had shown that resonant chains of planets like TRAPPIST-1 form when young planets migrate closer to their stars before the disc disappears.
In the TRAPPIST-1 system, they saw that the planets formed early, with which they deduced that “a potential difference, compared to the formation of the Earth , is that they could have, from the beginning, some hydrogen atmosphere and never having experienced a late giant impact. ”
“And this – the experts add – could change many things about evolution regarding the interior of the planet (…) and other things that have implications for habitability. ”
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