The red dwarf known as TRAPPIST-1 could not have produced a more interesting scenario. Today we learn that the star, some 40 light years out in the constellation Aquarius, hosts seven planets, all of which turn out to be comparable to the Earth in terms of size. Moreover, these worlds were discovered through the transit method, meaning we have mass and radius information for all of them. Today's report in Nature tells us that three of the planets lie in the habitable zone, and thus could have liquid water on their surfaces. TRAPPIST-1 b, c, d, e, f, g and h are the worlds in question, and all but TRAPPIST-1h appear to be rocky in composition, based on density measurements drawn from the mass and radius information. Drawing on existing climate models, the innermost planets b, c and d are probably too hot to allow liquid water to exist, while h may be too distant and cold. But the European Southern Observatory is reporting that TRAPPIST-1e, f and g orbit within the star's habitable...

You'll want to see the news conference scheduled by NASA at 1300 EST (1800 UTC) today, an exoplanet finding of considerable interest to Centauri Dreams readers (I'll have more on this later in the day). The event will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website. Links available here. Briefing participants: * Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington * Michael Gillon, astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium * Sean Carey, manager of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, California * Nikole Lewis, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore * Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge A Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) about exoplanets will be held following the briefing at 1500 EST (2000 UTC) with scientists available to answer questions in English and Spanish.

I'm always interested in ways readers can dig directly into data from our telescopes, and this morning I can point to two. I'll begin with the Lick Carnegie Exoplanet Survey, which has just released 60,949 precision Doppler velocities for 1,624 stars. The data draw on observations using HIRES (the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer) on the Keck 1 telescope on Mauna Kea (Hawaii). As exoplanet hunter Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) explains on his systemic site, the data contain hundreds of possibly planetary signals. If you'd like to dig into this material, which includes hints of a super-Earth around the fourth closest star to the Sun (Lalande 21185), I'll remind you of Stefano Meschiari's Systemic Console, developed with Laughlin as a way of exploring exoplanetary data. The latest version completely reworks the older Console and provides the tools needed to study the Lick Carnegie material. Versions of this open source software are available here, and a visit to the Earthbound...

It's no surprise that planets can affect the stars they orbit. We've used that fact for several decades now, relying on radial velocity studies that showed the movement of a star toward us and then away again as it was tugged on by the planet under investigation. But now we're hearing about another kind of planetary effect, one whose future uses may be intriguing. We're seeing a star's brightness change in evident synchrony with a planetary orbit. The star is some 370 light years away from the Earth. The planet in question is HAT-P-2b, a 'hot Jupiter' in a highly elliptical orbit that makes its closest approach to the star every 5.6 days. The planet, discovered by the automated HATNet project (Hungarian Automated Telescope Network), is about 8 times Jupiter's mass. The temperature changes its orbit should induce in its atmosphere led indirectly to the brightness discovery, for researchers led by Julien de Wit (MIT) wanted to learn about the circulation of energy in the planet's...

We're beginning to find evidence of objects like those in the Kuiper Belt beyond our own solar system. In this case, the work involves a white dwarf whose atmosphere has been recently polluted by an infalling object, giving us valuable data on the object's composition. The work involves the white dwarf WD 1425+540, whose atmosphere has been found to contain carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. The findings are unusual because white dwarfs are the dense remnants of normal stars, with gravitational fields strong enough to pull elements like these out of their atmospheres and into their interiors, where they are immune from detection by our instruments. And that implies a relatively recent origin for these elements. Lead author Siyi Xu (European Southern Observatory) and team worked with spectroscopic observations from HIRES (the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer) on the Keck Telescope and included data from the Hubble instrument. The researchers believe the white dwarf's...

When it comes to the nearest stars, our focus of late has been on Proxima Centauri and its intriguing planet. But of course the work on Centauri A and B continues at a good clip. The prospects in this system are enticing -- a G-class star like our own, a K-class dwarf likewise capable of hosting planets, and the red dwarf Proxima a scant 15000 AU away. Project Blue examines how we might image planets here as our radial velocity studies proceed. But we have much to learn, and not just about possible planets. A new paper by Pierre Kervella (Observatoire de Paris), working with Lionel Bigot and Fréderic Thévenin (both at the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur), reminds us of the importance of firming up our stellar data. We need to learn as much as possible about Centauri A and B not just because we'd like to find planets there but also because the work has implications for space missions, including the ESA's Gaia, which will tighten our distance measurements to many stars....

We've looked at the factors that are problematic for life around red dwarf stars for some time now, focusing on tidal lock (in which one side of the planet always faces the star) and stellar flare activity, which could dramatically affect life on the surface. A new paper from Vladimir Airapetian (NASA GSFC) and colleagues homes in on the latter problem, offering the idea that we should re-shape our notion of the habitable zone to include space weather. A planet in the habitable zone of any kind of star, according to the definition used most commonly today, is one on which liquid water could exist on the surface. But is this painting the habitable zone with too broad a brush? Because if we allow X-ray and extreme ultraviolet emissions into the picture -- these are common on red dwarf stars, and especially on younger ones -- then even clement temperatures at a planetary surface may not be enough. The problem: Stellar eruptions like flares and, in their most extreme form, coronal mass...

A key way to learn more about a given exoplanet is to home in on the properties of its star. So argue Stephen Kane (San Francisco State University) and colleagues in a new paper slated for the Astrophysical Journal. The star in question is Wolf 1061 (V2306 Ophiuchi), an M-class red dwarf some 13.8 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. In December of 2015, Australian astronomers announced the discovery of three planets around the star. Drawn out of data from the HARPS spectrograph at La Silla, the planets are all super-Earths, their radial velocity data supplemented with eight years of photometry from the All Sky Automated Survey. All three seem likely to be rocky planets, but firming this up would take transits, which the discovery team at the University of New South Wales estimated might occur, with a likelihood of about 14 percent for the inner world, dropping to 3% for the outer. Kane and team investigate the transit question in light of the fact that that two recent...