Potentially Habitable TRAPPIST-1 Planets May Be Covered in Water

It’s been seven years since astronomers were thrilled over the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system, a seven-planet solar system orbiting a star 40 light-years away. At first, it looked like it had all the right elements to sustain life. Today, we still don’t know if there’s life over there, but the theory that there could be life 40 light-years away seems just as possible as ever.

And now, researchers theorize that TRAPPIST-1 planets might be filled with tons of water.

TRAPPIST-1 orbits a red dwarf star, which fires off UV flares that can wreak havoc on planetary atmospheres. Scientists have long wondered if life could survive when a planet’s atmosphere is constantly being shredded by the sun?

Can water even stick around long enough to matter?

Thanks to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and a team led by astrobiologist Trent Thomas, we’ve got fresh data that sheds a little bit more light on what’s going on over there. For starters, TRAPPIST-1 c isn’t the Venus-style, thick-atomsophere’d planet we once thought it was.

It might even still have water vapor and oxygen, potentially from volcanic outgassing. Even cooler: the planets might still be a little volcanically active since they’re still releasing gases into the atmosphere, a process referred to as “outgassing.”

The researchers modeled outgassing based on the rocky members of our own solar system and found the TRAPPIST-1 planets likely have low magma movement, meaning their volcanic tops are going to be popping off anytime soon. Still, the math says some could outgas water at up to eight times Earth’s rate, even if most hover well below it.

TRAPPIST-1’s planets also seem to have Earth-style mantles that are relatively dry. The word relatively is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because when your baseline is Earth, where water is 0.02 percent of the Earth’s total mass, “dry” doesn’t mean desert. A few of these planets might still be ocean-covered “water worlds,” while others are more like Mars.

We still don’t know if TRAPPIST-1 planets are hospitable. They could just be giant planetary showrooms for rocks. For now, at least we know that there is little wetter than we once thought.

That is a good sign, especially as humanity looks to the stars to expand our civilization into the cosmos.