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♪

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A treasure trove
of planets found

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Astronomers are celebrating
a new discovery.

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Sean Carey, Manager, Spitzer
Science Center, Caltech IPAC

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The big news is that
around a very nearby

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cold, small star we
found seven rocky,

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Earth-sized planets, all of
which could potentially

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have liquid water.

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Three of them orbit in
the habitable zone

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around the star.

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And liquid water could exist on
any of the seven planets

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given the right conditions.

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Nikole Lewis, James Webb
Telescope Project Scientist,

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Space Telescope Science
Institute

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For me it's mind-blowing.

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The first time I saw what
the system had in it,

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I was just like, "You got to be
kidding me!"

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Then I looked at
the data myself.

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I'm like, "Yup,
there they all are."

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It's just, I would have
never predicted this.

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It's beyond, you know, anything
I could've ever dreamt of.

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The planetary system
is called TRAPPIST-1

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after the Belgian-operated
telescope in Chile.

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TRAPPIST found two
planets in 2016.

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NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope, with the help of

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ground-based telescopes,
discovered five more.

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Michael Gillon, Principal
Investigator, TRAPPIST,

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University of Liege, Belgium

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I felt super-excited.

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Amazed by the very existence
of this system...

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was kind of... of
yeah... of shock.

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The TRAPPIST-1 planets are
extremely close to one another.

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From a planet's surface

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you could easily see other
TRAPPIST-1 planets in the sky.

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If you were standing on
one of these planets

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you'd actually see a lot of them

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sort of in the sky whipping by

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on these very short
orbital periods.

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NASA's James Webb Telescope,
launching in 2018,

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could teach us even more
about the TRAPPIST-1 system.

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It will be able to detect
the chemical fingerprints of

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water, methane and oxygen of
potential atmospheres,

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key ingredients in
assessing habitability.

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It is an excellent,
fantastic discovery.

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All images of planets are
artist's conceptions.

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory