If you had to pick a place to set up shop amid the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 star system, 39 light-years from Earth, the fourth rock from that alien sun is the best place to start.
That Earth-sized world, known as TRAPPIST-1 e, came out on top in a recent round of exoplanetary climate modeling, detailed in a paper published Nov. 1 by the Astrophysical Journal.
Not that anyone’s planning on setting up shop there soon: Unless there’s a breakthrough that allows us to travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to get to TRAPPIST-1. But the climate modeling methods developed for the TRAPPIST-1 system could help scientists decide which planets to target first with telescopes capable of analyzing alien atmospheres.
