Seth Finley

For my reading response I choose a nasa article about the discovery of largest batch of

earth-sized, habitable-zone planets around a single star. I think really anything about space is

really interesting so when i saw this article about nasa i knew this was the article i was going to

respond to. I know quite a bit about space but i didn't know that there was a discovery of earth

sized planets. The seven planets reside in the constellation aquarius, and were first discovered

in 2016 with the small TRAPPIST telescope located in Chile. This exoplanet system is called

TRAPPIST-1, named after the telescope that discovered it, at about 40 light-years (235 trillion

miles) from earth, TRAPPIST-1 has 7 planets that we are currently aware of that all could

possibly have water. 3 of the 7 planets orbit the ultra-cool dwarf stars habitable zone. All seven

of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun, the

planets are also fairly close to each other. If a person stood on the surface of one of these

exoplanets (planets not in our solar system) surface, they could look up and potentially see

geological features or clouds of neighboring planets. The author of this article explains that this

could be a breakthrough in finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life.

said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency's Science Mission Directorate in

Washington. This is a rare discovery that we shouldn't waste, it's the best target to study the

atmospheres of potentially habitable, earth-sized worlds.