Hubble Gets First Peek at Atmospheres of Rocky Alien Planets
The two potentially habitable exoplanets both seem to have dense, compact blankets of gas like those around Earth or Venus.
Circling a star just 40 light-years away, a trio of Earth-size exoplanets captured attention when they were first announced in May. Now, scientists have learned more about what two of these worlds are really like.
For now, the outermost planet, TRAPPIST-1d, is still very much a mystery. But the two innermost planets, called TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c, are stepping into the starlight, with a little help from the Hubble Space Telescope.
New observations of these two planets, made as they passed between their star and Earth, show that they are rocky, like Earth, and possibly life-friendly. And for the first time, the team was able to search for atmospheres on the small worlds, revealing that both may have dense,
