Important TRAPPIST-1c Updates From James Webb Space Telescope

how wonderful person this is Anton and we finally have new updates in regards to the iconic trappist-1 system that sort of looks like this simulated in space engine a very famous system announced by NASA in 2017 because as we discovered later it contains seven terrestrial planets planets very similar to Earth in mass and in density with four of these planets potentially in the habitable zone of

the star system in essence implying that we might have discovered a star system with at least several planets that could hypothetically host life and maybe even be somewhat similar to planet Earth at least that's what a lot of scientists hoped but over the years various observations from for example how about telescope and a lot of other observations from other telescopes including mathematical calculations started to produce

so much contradictory results on the one hand many studies suggested that water could be possible here would sound these planets potentially containing hospitable conditions other studies proposing that Saudi parents could be entirely different in terms of what's inside of the planets but still contain Rocky surface and maybe even water and so for basically something like six to seven years now scientists have been eagerly waiting for

new results from the jeans web Space Telescope because one of its missions was actually to take a look at some of these planets and to try to see if at least we can maybe see some Agnes here because by detecting atmospheres we could then determine what's on the surface and what's even possibly inside and so several investigations have been already proposed in the last few months

and at least one was officially finished just a few months ago you can find that video in the description but in a natural it was the investigation of the closest planet trappist-1b the one that's expected to be the hottest and the one that's not in the habitable zone here the scientists discovered that it doesn't seem to contain any significant atmosphere that will be made out of

hydrogen or carbon dioxide it could still have some kind of a thin atmosphere that's different but nothing substantial to suggest that this planet was in any way atmospherically active instead what the scientists discovered is something very similar to Mercury probably dark very likely extremely hot on one side and possibly cold on the other side but larger and more massive in size so maybe not the most

exciting Discovery but a very important Discovery nevertheless and so now we have news from the second planet Playa trap is the one C but before that let's briefly talk about the star system just so that you remember exactly what it is so as so many other star systems in the Milky Way this is what's known as a red dwarf a star with a temperature of about

2500 Kelvin which is much much colder than the sun whose temperature is 5700 Kelvin and it's a star system that's just under 41 light years away from planet Earth but because this is a very dim Red Dwarf it's actually really difficult to find it and it only produces a fraction of the sun's Starlight here's roughly how the Sun compares to this part the core Star both

in terms of color and in terms of brightness and so it's definitely much more it's actually very similar to Jupiter in size even though it's about nine percent of the solar mass and because of this the planets here orbit much much closer compared to the solar system and actually somewhat comparable to the moons around Jupiter a single orbit here takes anywhere from one and a half

days to 19 days for the farthest planet and because of this just like around Jupiter it's kind of assumed that a lot of these planets are very likely tidally locked always facing with the same side toward the star but one side being cold and one side possibly being hot now it's not certain that this is exactly what happens but it's the most likely explanation but compared

to the solar system this system is actually older it's probably 7.6 billion years old at least 3 billion years old older than planet Earth and then the Sun and so because these planets had over 7 billion years to evolve it's quite likely that they're actually very different from anything in the solar system but more importantly this makes it a perfect Target to see what happens to

here very likely happens elsewhere but it's the planet d e f and possibly G that are the most exciting because as you can see from this image they're basically in that region where the habitable zone could be located the conditions necessary for possibly liquid water but in order to have liquid water or any kind of habitability you obviously have to have proper atmosphere and so pretty

much over the first studies are going to be focusing on figuring out what kind of atmosphere these planets have by looking at the types of emissions they currently produce and the way whether it's done right now is by actually doing this the scientists look at the planet orbiting the star in order to find my new differences in the reflections coming from the surface of the planet

and by looking at what's known as the secondary Eclipse when the planet moves behind the star and what this allows us to do is calculate the amount of mid infrared light with a very specific wavelengths that seems to be coming from the day side of the planet to be more exact it's actually measured in microns and Gene's web is perfect for measuring 15 Micron wavelengths of

light and the amount of mid infrared light is directly related to the temperature of the surface which is generally influenced by the atmosphere of the planet to be more specific carbon dioxide usually absorbs 15 Micron light and so for example if there was a very thin carbon dioxide atmosphere with no clouds you would see a dramatic dip that you see right there in blue if there

was a very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere you would see something similar to the yellow line here it actually is a venus-like atmosphere with sulfuric clouds green suggests something that has no atmosphere or basically bear and rock with the actual detection being the Red Dot here's a slightly more detailed version from the paper itself and so what this kind of implies right now based on the observations

and the very thorough analysis from the paper is that there doesn't seem to be anything or in essence because carbon dioxide usually absorbs these specific frequencies and nothing like that was observed in this case the planet appears to be either Barren or potentially contains very different atmosphere okay so it doesn't actually mean that it's Barren it just means that it's very likely not a venous like

and not carbon dioxide based but there could still be some other options including atmospheres that are just exotic so for example this could be a planet with an oxygen dominated atmosphere that would not be detected with this technique but explaining the origin of this oxygen would be difficult on Earth it's usually produced by life but generally we believe it's also produced by the Association of water

into hydrogen and oxygen so that means that this planet would have to have water but because of the proximity to the star it's quite likely that this is actually a really hot planet so the presence of water here would be very difficult to justify on the other hand it could also be ammonia or methane similar to Titan but once again because it's so close to the

star these types of atmospheres would very likely be destroyed extremely quickly so the methane and ammonia would have to be replenished by something like for example life no evidence for any of this exists just yet we could obviously have water-based atmosphere as well but it's the same problem as before where is the water coming from and how is it actually surviving here so here you would

actually have to have a really huge Ocean on the surface for any of this to make sense because the star in this case is 7.6 billion years old it's quite likely that these oceans would have to survive for a very long time and based on the density calculations at the moment this is not a very likely explanation it is a most likely or Iraqi planets and

potentially do not have any oceans and the other option is hydrogen and helium similar to Saturn and Jupiter but these types of volatiles do not really exist for a very long time unless the planet is really massive so once again quite unlikely and the last but not least or technically the most important atmosphere would be nitrogen based that's basically the atmosphere of planet Earth most of

the atmosphere here is nitrogen now that would be kind of difficult to detect right now and also we don't even know where nitrogen on Earth came from Mostly because nitrogen is also not particularly stable and does escape pretty quickly and so because of the proximity to the star it's also unlikely to be nitrogen it's not going to survive for so long unless there is a source

somewhere replenishing nitrogen all the time and so unless they contain nitrogen from the beginning it's extremely unlikely to have that either and so the most likely candidate here was always carbon dioxide we recently NASA released this beautiful visualization of carbon dioxide cycle right here on planet Earth and so if we could see how this gas propagates this is sort of what it would look like and

in this case CO2 usually radiates energy away pretty well and doesn't actually escape the planet very easily and so even though on a cold pilot it can sometimes freeze turning into ice it's still a lot more likely to exist just like it exists on Mars Venus and planet Earth and it's also relatively easy to see it on the planet with telescopes like the James Webb and

through the association from the solar radiation it can also turn into a carbon monoxide and even ozone basically providing a lot of necessary conditions for potential life and so the initial hope here was to discover some kind of a sign of CO2 somewhere on the surface but just like with trappist-1b the extremely detailed observations revealed either no atmosphere or extremely thin atmosphere that's not going to

be having any major effects on the surface with the surface temperature measured to be approximately 107 degrees Celsius or 220 Fahrenheit and the reflectivity showing us that it's most likely just bear and rock and nothing else okay it could be some kind of a interesting Rock but based on the reflection right now it looks to be a little bit more similar to for example Mars than

something similar to planet Earth although the actual observations do seem to be very different from what the scientists initially proposed and from what they initially simulated it doesn't seem to resemble any Planet the scientists imagined initially and so with a relatively high surface temperature and also being a third as massive as planet Earth and about 10 percent larger it basically presents us with a very different

world from anything we thought it would be potentially a large massive Barren rock pretty hot on one side and possibly very cold on the other side and so if there was any atmosphere it would most likely redistribute some of this heat in this case though there doesn't seem to be any redistribution whatsoever the temperature just doesn't change much at all basically making a spotted a kind

of a super sized Mercury so two planets down five to go now the first two were not particularly exciting to begin with simply because they were just too close to the star the next four though are very exciting d e f and g are actually the planets that a lot of us are super curious about and the planets were most likely going to be hearing about

before the end of 2023 and So within the next few months we're probably going to find out more about these planets and if maybe one of them contains something and so I guess we're just going to have to be a bit more patient and let the suspense continue but once we find out about the other planets I'll make sure to follow this up in the next

video thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has learned about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support this channel on patreon by Julian Channel membership or by any wonderful person t-shirts you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] thank you foreign