A team of scientists believes that the TRAPPIST-1 system might be hosting gas giant planets.
The discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven Earth-like planets raised a lot of interest after being revealed at the start of the year. As scientists are still looking to determine which, if any, of these planets, might be hospitable or present signs of life, a team of researchers is looking at another element.
Carnegie Institution for Science researchers are behind a new study which questions and proposes the existence of gas giant planets somewhere on the outskirts of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
Gas Giant Planets to Reveal New Data About Our Own
Presently, the scientific community is aware of there being only seven planets in the newly discovered TRAPPIST-1 system. The existence of the ultra-cool dwarf star at its center was spotted and revealed by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope.
Now, this new study proposes the existence of another set of planets besides the seven, Earth-like ones that are already known. The research team suggests that these other planets, gas giant such as Jupiter or Saturn, are situated much further away from their star parent.
“A number of other star systems that include Earth-sized planets and super-Earths are also home to at least one gas giant,” states Alan Boss, the first author of the paper.
Together with his colleagues, Boss used the CAPSCam (the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search Camera) to determine the upper limits of the mass of any potential gas giant planets in this system.
The research team considers that, by finding gas giants in the TRAPPIST-1 system, scientists could maybe solve one of the mysteries of our own galaxy. Namely, it might help determine how these giant planets came to form.
One theory goes back to the early days of the Sun when this was surrounded by a disk of dust and gas. The Earth and terrestrial-like planets are believed to have been formed by the slow accretion of the disk’s rocky material.
Gas giants might have had a similar start. But they might have also gathered enough materials to gravitationally attract a large mass of the surrounding gas.
Both this theory and the newly advanced idea have some still unexplained elements. The researchers are hoping could be explained by the presence of the vehiculated gas giant planets.
The test results and research findings are presented in a paper released in The Astronomical Journal.
Image Source: JPL/NASA
Michael Turner
