Hasta La Ideas

During a news conference in Washington DC Wednesday, NASA revealed that, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, they’ve found seven new Earth-sized planets orbiting a star just 40 light years away from us. “Seven Earth-sized planets have been observed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope around a tiny, nearby, ultra-cool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1. Three of these planets are firmly in the habitable zone.Over 21 days, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope measured the drop in light as each planet passed in front of the star. Spitzer was able to identify a total of seven rocky worlds, including three in the habitable zone, where liquid water might be found.”The Trappist system is named after the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, which originally discovered three of the planets and announced their findings in May of last year. With the help of other ground-based telescopes such as the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of them and discovered another five…(Read…)