Discovery of seven-exoplanet system energizes world science news
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8208
Artist concept of the seven-planet TRAPPIST-1 system.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Could recent news from exoplanet discoverers shift interpretation of Walt Whitman’s brief poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”? The poem appears at the end of this report. In 1865 it condemned a technically detailed astronomy lecture as tediously prosaic in contrast to the “mystical” experience of simply looking “up in perfect silence at the stars.” Now the editors of the New York Times have declared that what makes the latest exoplanet news “so irresistible is the mystery and allure of the cosmos that all of us know from the first time we looked up at the stars"—and to clinch the point, the editors have deployed substantial technical detail.
Media worldwide have been expressing a mix of technical and esthetic enthusiasm for the new discovery, which the editors of Nature summarized this way: “Seven small planets whose surfaces could harbour liquid water have been spotted around a nearby dwarf star. If such a configuration is common in planetary systems, our Galaxy could be teeming with Earth-like planets.” The scientific report detailing the worlds orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 appears in Nature‘s 23 February issue.
TRAPPIST stands for Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, an instrument in Chile controlled by astronomers from the University of Liège in Belgium. Physics Today‘s Steven K. Blau has posted a brief news article about the discoveries. He addresses the star’s relative proximity to Earth—39 light-years—as well as the other instruments used, the method for observing what the scientists’ report calls “a dramatically co-planar system seen nearly edge-on,” the rough estimating of the planetary masses, habitability zone considerations, and desiderata for future investigations.
Since the 1990s more than 3400 exoplanets have been found, but it’s obvious that the extensively enthusiastic media coverage this time suggests that the story has escalated public longing to know if there’s life beyond Earth. At the Guardian, science editor Ian Sample ‘s article carried a subhead identifying new “hope that the hunt for alien life beyond the solar system can start much sooner than previously thought.” As a piece at Quartz put it, something about the announcement of the seven new exoplanets seems “to have struck a chord with millions of people in ways the previous thousands did not.”
The hopeful can cherish some authoritative encouragement. Ignas A. G. Snellen of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands wrote Nature‘s explanatory News and Views commentary . He noted that in recent years, evidence for an abundance of Earth-sized planets in the galaxy has been mounting and that the new findings indicate that they’re “even more common than previously thought.” Concerning highly revealing transits, or passages, of planets between Earth and their star, he continued:
From geometric arguments, we expect that for every transiting planet found, there should be a multitude of similar planets (20–100 times more) that, seen from Earth, never pass in front of their host star. Of course, the authors could have been lucky, but finding seven transiting Earth-sized planets in such a small sample suggests that the Solar System with its four (sub-)Earth-sized planets might be nothing out of the ordinary.
And then there’s MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager . Since 2013, when the MacArthur Foundation described her as a “visionary scientist” and named her a fellow, reporters have been inquiring about her vision for establishing the presence of life beyond Earth. Recently she told the New York Times that the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets “make the search for life in the galaxy imminent.” She declared, “For the first time ever, we don’t have to speculate. We just have to wait and then make very careful observations” and see what’s in the planets’ atmospheres.
Quartz was ready for all of this late last year when it published “Scientists are closer to finding alien life than they have ever been” by reporter Akshat Rathi , who holds a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University. After the TRAPPIST-1 announcement, he published “NASA’s discovery of a solar system with seven Earth-like planets will change how we hunt for alien life.”
That’s what NASA official Thomas Zurbuchen believes. The online version of the New York Times‘s front-page exoplanet coverage highlights a minute-long video in which he predicts that “finding a second Earth is not just a matter of if, but when.” The researchers themselves call the TRAPPIST-1 system “the largest treasure of terrestrial planets ever detected around a single star,” enough “to revive the quest for life in the Universe.”
Consider a sampling of headlines reflecting—or extending—the exoplanet enthusiasm of “learn’d astronomers":
- Space.com : “What would life be like on the TRAPPIST-1 planets?”
- Huffington Post : “It’s our solar system in miniature, but could TRAPPIST-1 host another Earth?”
- Forbes.com : “The TRAPPIST worlds: Should we invest in a backup planet for Earth?”
- Christian Science Monitor : “Could the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets harbor alien life? Several Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting a small, dim dwarf star could support life—if they have the right kind of atmosphere.”
Science Friday‘s coverage on National Public Radio, emphasizing “seven new chances for life,” began, “It’s not often that scientists make a discovery so big that the whole internet is talking about it.” Talking about it indeed. There was a Google doodle , called “charming ” by Fox News. So ubiquitous on the Web have been NASA’s artists’ conceptions that the Atlantic posted a story about the two NASA illustrators who create the pictures in consultation with scientists. Online newspaper opinion pages included at least two cartoons framing political satire in terms of the newly known exoplanets—one a gag about an orbiting wall for excluding aliens, the other about an exoplanet requiring “extreme vetting” of would-be immigrants from Earth.
The TRAPPIST-1 system even has its own website , put up by the discovery team “to collect [their] best and most up-to-date knowledge of this system, while communicating [their] fascination and awe.” The site has a section for short stories and graphic novels, presented with the request “Please enjoy these works keeping in mind that those are mostly works of fiction, written with artistic licence!” One story, translated from French, comes from Laurence Suhner, a Swiss science-fiction novelist who teaches creative writing at the University of Geneva. For the first 90 days her story will appear only at Nature, where it’s a Futures feature. It begins this way:
So. Here I am. At the line between dark and light. At the very border that separates the side facing the star from the one that remains eternally shaded. It’s like being at the edge of the visible world, at the end of the observable Universe, in that grey zone, permanent twilight, where the shadows stretch, revealing the whimsical landscape. Yin and yang.
NASA “advertises” a vacation on the fourth TRAPPIST planet.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Gizmodo points out that as part of a public relations strategy for exoplanet science, NASA has made itself “the unofficial planetary hype train conductor, along with researchers behind the discovery,” seeking to do “everything in their power to drum up public excitement—including building a mythology for TRAPPIST-1 that blends science fact and fiction.” The new exoplanet news has been incorporated at NASA’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau website . NASA also took to Twitter, asking "#7NamesFor7NewPlanets?” Astrophysicist and TV host Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested that the seven planets, which after all orbit a dwarf star, be named for the seven dwarfs in Walt Disney’s Snow White: Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey.
The media coverage involves some skepticism and restraint too, but not much. A report at Slate carries the headline “NASA’s new exoplanets aren’t where the aliens live. Probably.” It ends with this: “Not aliens yet. Of course, that doesn’t stop NASA from capitalizing on the thrill of the idea.”
At the blog NASA Watch, Keith Cowing, who wasn’t under a news embargo, inferred what was about to be announced, then announced it himself before it was announced officially. He’s not at all skeptical about the importance, but his posting did include this cautionary note, with the capitalized letters further emphasized by a red font: “This is important for all you UK tabloid writers—NO ONE HAS DISCOVERED LIFE ON ANOTHER PLANET. Got that?”
Back in December, serious science stakeholders considered the combination of flamboyance and substance in the glitzy California awards ceremony for science’s multimillion-dollar Breakthrough Prizes. Some wondered if emulation of Hollywood could truly elevate scientists’ public standing. Exoplanet hype , both online and in the media generally, will no doubt occasion similar questioning.
Meanwhile, if the worldwide coverage constitutes an indicator, lots of people are looking up at the stars now in a new way—and not in the disdain-the-technical-facts spirit of the Whitman poem. Most probably haven’t even seen these thoughts from a NASA press release , combining the imaginative and the technical:
All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun. The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman, 1865
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.