#thecosmosnews Meet TOI-700’s exoplanets: Our best bet for alien life
Red dwarf stars were supposed to be inhospitable. But TOI-700, now with at least two potentially habitable worlds, is quite the exception.
Somewhere out there, likely right within the Milky Way lies the very first inhabited planet that humanity will discover. Although we don’t know which world it is or how long it will take us to find those critical, unambiguous biosignatures, we fully expect that progressively better and more suggestive observations will pave the road toward its discovery. After all, the ingredients for life are found all throughout the Universe, and each new stellar system that forms with rocky, terrestrial planets around it must be considered as a chance for something quite remarkable and unique to emerge.
Since 1990, we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets: planets in orbit around other stars. Many are approximately Earth-sized; many orbit their parent stars at the right distance for liquid water to potentially exist on their surfaces; many are close enough that a future telescope — technologically within reach before the year 2100 arrives — could directly image them and determine whether they’re actually inhabited or not. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of known exoplanets were discovered by NASA’s now-defunct Kepler mission, the most likely system to house extraterrestrial life is the planetary system surrounding the star TOI-700, discovered by the ongoing TESS mission. Now known to have at least two potentially inhabited, Earth-sized worlds around it, it just might be humanity’s best bet for finding life outside of our Solar System.
