Orbital Harmony Limits Late Arrival Of Water On TRAPPIST-1 Planets

An illustration showing what the TRAPPIST-1 system might look like from a vantage point near planet TRAPPIST-1f (right). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the star TRAPPIST-1 in near-perfect harmony, and U.S. and European researchers have used that harmony to determine how much physical abuse the planets could have withstood in their infancy.

“After rocky planets form, things bash into them,” said astrophysicist Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux in France. “It’s called bombardment, or late accretion, and we care about it, in part, because these impacts can be an important source of water and volatile elements that foster life.”

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