“Unbelievable Transformation: Man’s Reckless Encounter with a Particle Accelerator Defies Science!”
After Gillon and his team made this groundbreaking discovery, they decided to seek out similar solar systems and started a brand new project called Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultracool Stars, otherwise known as SPECULOOS (yes, it’s named after a cookie).
Proxima b: One Last Hope for Life
The seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 solar system aren’t the only hopefully terrestrial planets scientists have found. In August, scientists discovered Proxima b, a rocky planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. Today’s best telescopes have fallen short when it’s come to examining Proxima b. They’re too small and too simplistic to really get a good glimpse of the planet, which is just over four light years away. That’s significantly closer than TRAPPIST-1’s planets, but it’s still too far for modern telescopes.
So far, scientists haven’t seen Proxima b, they’ve only studied its orbit, similar to how they studied the orbit of TRAPPIST-1’s planets to discover their mass and density. If TRAPPIST-1 turns out to be a major bust, and the planets are swathed in radiation and toxic water, at least we have hope elsewhere.
