Scientist Unravel the Mystery About Alien Planets

Seven Earth-sized Planets orbit the star TRAPPIST-1 in near-perfect harmony, and U.S. and European researchers have used that harmony to determine how much physical abuse the could have withstood in their infancy.

Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux in France and Astrophysicist said that after rocky Planets form, things bash into them. This is called bombardment, or late accretion, and we care about it, in part, because these impacts can be an important source of water and volatile elements that foster life.”

In a study available online today in Nature Astronomy, Raymond and colleagues from Rice University’s NASA-funded CLEVER Planets project and seven other institutions used a computer model of the bombardment phase of formation in TRAPPIST-1 to explore the impacts its  could have withstood without getting knocked out of harmony.Raymond said that deciphering the impact history of is difficult in our solar system and might seem like a hopeless task in systems light-years away.

Those tools don’t exist for studying bombardment on exoplanets.TRAPPIST-1, about 40 light-years away, is far smaller and cooler than our sun. Its Planets are named alphabetically from b to h in order of their distance from the star. The time needed to complete one orbit around the star—equivalent to one year on Earth—is 1.5 days on b and 19 days on Planets h.  Their orbital periods form near-perfect ratios, a resonant arrangement reminiscent of harmonious musical notes. For example, for every eight “years” on  b, five pass on  c, three on d, two on e and so on.