On February 22, NASA excitedly announced the discovery of seven possibly inhabitable, Earth-sized planets orbiting the nearby dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1.
Michaël Gillon of the University of Liège in Belgium led a team of astronomers and discovered three of these exoplanets orbiting the small, reddish star in early 2016. Less than a year later, seven temperate exoplanets were officially observed, also closely orbiting the small star. Three of these planets possess conditions suitable for the presence of liquid water and quite potentially, life itself. The planets comprise an extremely compact solar system. In fact they orbit so close to one another, that if you were to stand on one of the planets, you would be able to see the other celestial bodies with just your naked eye.
This discovery marked another groundbreaking leap on the long list of NASA’s impressive accomplishments. Let’s look at a few more of their most recent discoveries in space exploration:
Ever wondered about what the surface of the sun is like? Well, so has NASA. So much so that in 2018, they plan on sending the Solar Probe Plus within 4 million miles of it to answer some questions scientists have had for quite some time now. They hope that this pioneer solar probe mission will address why the sun’s atmosphere (a whopping 2 million degrees Celsius) is so much hotter than its surface (only 5,500 degrees Celsius), how solar wind gets accelerated and why the sun sometimes emits high energy particles that often endanger unmanned probes and astronauts. This probe will be the closest any man-made vessel has gotten to the center of our solar system.
I don’t know about you, but when I think space, I immediately think ALIENS. Learning about TRAPPIST-1 and its potential to support extraterrestrial life was truly remarkable, but we don’t need to wander too far from our own solar system to search for alien life forms. After several flybys in 2005, the Cassini imaging team determined that Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, held a global ocean layer beneath its icy crust after discovering active geysers in its south pole. Investigating the potential for this mysterious ocean to host life, however microscopic, is something the team at NASA hopes to uncover. Who knows? We may not be as lonely here in the universe as we initially thought.
Ceres is the largest celestial body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has been rightly named a dwarf planet. However, scientists at NASA have puzzled over the dwarf planet’s one and only ice volcano, Ahuna Mons. “Imagine if there was just one volcano on all of Earth," Michael Sori (of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona) had tried to explain. It was a perplexing reality until newer research revealed that a phenomenon called "viscous relaxation" may have been the culprit behind the odd lack of cryovolcanoes on the surface of Ceres. Over eons, the solids on the surface would relax and meld into the surface especially because the volcanoes on this dwarf planet would have been made up of rock and water ice.
NASA continues to make vast strides in space exploration and tends the flame that fuels our innate curiosity about the vastness of our universe. The future of NASA could pave a spectacular era in the advancement of space travel and discovery. We may go where no man has gone before.
