Trappist-1

Everybody has heard about the new descovery in astronomy, it's been announced in all the media. Just because of this, I'm going to focus on some facts that media has "avoided" or that most people don't know. I'm talking about the discovery of a planet system with one star, TRAPPIST-1, and 7 planets arround it, and all just 41 light years away from the Earth.

First of all, this system was discovered on 2015, and this year astronomers have found 4 earth-sized planets more arround the star (on 2015 they thought there were just 3).

Then, most people think that this discovery was done by NASA, and this is wrong. Actually, the discovery of the planets belongs to astronomers of different groups, but mainly it belongs to a belgian group that used a telescope of NASA. Lot of people thinks that it was NASA to discover the new planets because NASA has a lot of access to the media (22,3 M followers on twitter) and when they published the new they didn't specify who had done the discovery.

Then, i'ts well known that five of the seven planets have the size of the Earth. This could be true, but actually we know just more or less their size, and the same happens with the mass. For example, the plane TRAPPIST-1 c has a mass of 1.38 the mass of the Earth, but with a margin of error of 0.61. This kind of imprecisions will disappear when the James Webb Space Telescope starts its work on 2018.