Category Archives: Astronomy

13. Extra eyeglasses

You wont forget the ones on your face, but something may happen to that pair.

14. Kids stuff

I have no children, so I cant specify items. I can, however, advise you to bring whatever you will need to keep your offspring happy, comfortable, and occupied. Be aware that, in many locations, cellphone and Wi-Fi access may be limited or nonexistent. Bring along something that doesnt rely on wireless access to entertain your kids. You may discover, much to your chagrin, that your young children do not share your appreciation or awe for the eclipse. Obviously, youre a terrible parent. But dont worry; theyll be seven years older when the 2024 eclipse rolls around.

15. Broad-brimmed hat

This will keep the Sun off your head and face, and also your neck if the hats brim is wide enough. Youll probably sweat, but thats a reasonable trade-off. Keep drinking water.

16. Power inverter

You cant plug most laptops or video players directly into a car. A small DC-to-AC power inverter will let your passengers play games or movies for the whole length of the trip without having to worry about draining the batteries in their devices. Another similar device is a car-lighter-plug-to-USB socket. Such adapters can operate or charge items that dont require much power, like cellphones.

17. Pillow

Actually, bring a pillow for every reclining chair you take along. Your passengers also might like to use these in the car if the ride is long.

18. Sunglasses

Remember, despite their name, sunglasses are not for viewing the Sun through. They are for providing eye comfort when you look at everything else.

19. Cash

If you meet me at the event Im hosting in St. Joseph, Missouri, you can thank me with this. Seriously, some vendors at eclipse events may not take credit or debit cards, and, even for those who do, with the huge numbers of people in transit, paying with cash may save you some serious time.

20. Insect repellent

The farther along the shadows path toward the southeastern United States you set up, the more important this item will become.

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25 things to bring to the eclipse | Astronomy.com - Astronomy Magazine

When a massive star expends its fuel, its core collapses into a dense object and sends the rest of its gas outward in an event called a supernova. Whats left is mostly neutron stars or black holes. And now, Hubble seems to have seen a supernova blink out suggesting it captured the moment when a black hole took over.

While some supernova events are explosive and leave clouds of debris for thousands of years (aka nebula) like SN 1054, the star in question seems to have begun to explode and then had all its gas sucked right back into the black hole at the center. This can happen when the core collapse of the star is especially massive. Rather than exploding, the gas collapses directly into the core of the star.

Only a few of these so called massive fails (yes, thats what theyre calling them) have been spotted, so astronomers are cautious about the results. But this particular star, located in the galaxy NGC 6946, was bright enough to see from 22 million light years away and faded in an instant, suggesting a massive stellar-mass black hole was the driving culprit.

Read more here:

A star turned into a black hole before Hubble's very eyes - Astronomy Magazine

David Baron Liveright: 2017. ISBN: 9781631490163

Buy this book: US UK Japan

Stocktrek Images/National Geographic Creative

The progress of an eclipse seen from Australia in 2012.

On 21 August 2017, the United States will experience its first all-American total solar eclipse. The path of totality's full shadow some 100 kilometres wide will for the first time make landfall only in the United States, passing over the homes of 12 million people in 14 states, from Oregon to the Carolinas. Heliophysicists and umbraphiles from around the world are preparing for it, along with Department of Transportation officials. The former are still pondering the results of the 1999 eclipse, whose path crossed Europe from Cornwall to Romania and beyond, and of total eclipses since. The latter are doing their best to ensure that millions of drivers get safely into and out of the path.

A total solar eclipse is the most stupendous sight in nature.

The fuss is understandable. A total solar eclipse is the most stupendous sight in nature: the abruptly darkening sky; Baily's beads, glints of sunlight shining through lunar valleys; the dazzling diamond-ring effect; the spiky, pearly solar corona. Then, a couple of minutes later, the whole show in reverse. Equally compelling is the knowledge that you are witnessing a syzygy, an alignment of Earth, Moon and Sun that darkens the sky by an additional factor of 10,000 in the last minute alone. Now, four books all anticipate the coming celestial event in different ways.

In American Eclipse, journalist David Baron harks back to the total eclipse visible in the United States in July 1878. (I read this book in draft and provided a blurb.) A group of eminent scientists, including astronomer Henry Draper and his wife, Anna (see S. Nelson Nature 539, 491492; 2016), travelled to Rawlins, Wyoming, to witness it. But, as Baron relates, 31-year-old whizz-kid inventor Thomas Edison gained the lion's share of publicity, even though he was just tagging along. Edison brought one of his devices, a tasimeter, to measure minute shifts in heat from the Sun's corona during the eclipse. He was unprepared for the strength of the signal, however, and his instrument's needle pinned at its maximum reading. It wasn't until around 1940 that physicists Walter Grotrian, Bengt Edln and Hannes Alfvn found the solar corona to have a temperature of at least 1 million C. Had the tasimeter worked, the scattering of sunlight that we see as the inner corona would have misleadingly given Edison the Sun's surface temperature, 6,000 C.

Baron's stories are good ones, well told. The pioneering US astronomer Maria Mitchell the first professor hired at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York took a group of alumnae, although they weren't offered free rail travel like their male counterparts. Astronomer and inventor Samuel Pierpont Langley, meteorologist Cleveland Abbe and solar spectroscopist-astronomer Charles Young also witnessed the eclipse. Nine years before, Young had co-discovered the green line in the spectrum of the corona that proved key in understanding coronal temperature; in the 1940s, it was found to come from iron gas so hot that many of its atoms have lost half their electrons.

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Astronomy: An all-American eclipse : Nature : Nature Research - Nature.com

NASAs Discovery mission to a smashed protoplanet core will reach its target four years early after a new launch date. Instead of launching in 2023, the craft will now in launch in 2022 and will reach its target, the asteroid Psyche, by 2026.

Psyche orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter and thanks to its component of nickel-iron metal, studying it will give scientists a closer look at the space collisions that create planets. Psyche was the 16th asteroid discovered, but it will be the first world scientists explore made of metal instead of rock or ice. Psyches metal core means at one point in time the asteroid was likely a protoplanet, or a large body of matter that turns into a planet, that had repeated collisions that resulted in leaving just the metal core.

After some consideration, NASA reached out to the Psyche team to see if it would be possible to rework the spacecraft to get an earlier launch date. A 2022 launch will perch the Psyche craft well for a Mars assist in 2023. That assist will help get the craft to Psyche four years ahead of schedule.

The biggest advantage is the excellent trajectory, which gets us there about twice as fast and is more cost effective, Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe said in a press release. We are all extremely excited that NASA was able to accommodate this earlier launch date. The world will see this amazing metal world so much sooner.

Space Systems Loral (SSL) is building the Psyche spacecraft for the mission and had to change things around to accommodate the new trajectory. The solar array system was changed from a four-panel straight row design to a five-panel x-shaped design, which will give the craft the power it needs to move at the faster pace.

Aside from planet creation, the team hopes to learn more information about where Psyche came from and what its surface is like.

Read more here:

NASA's mission to a planetary core has been moved up - Astronomy Magazine

This article originally appeared in our February 2017 issue of Astronomy.

Virtual reality is finally entering prime time. And thats good news for astronomy junkies.

You can explore Mars, manipulate the solar system, experiment with orbital dynamics, and land on the Moon, all from the comfort of your home.

To understand just what virtual reality is, lets distinguish between the two different ideas behind combining the digital and the real world. Augmented reality (AR) consists of adding digital components to the real world. Virtual reality (VR), a more immersive approach, removes all constraints of the physical world and places you directly into a computer simulation. VR allows you to float among the stars, create or destroy virtual solar systems, or finally get a taste of that childhood dream becoming an astronaut.

Just how does VR work for the enthusiastic amateur astronomer? VR can be broken down into a couple of areas: mobile VR and high-end VR.

Examples of mobile VR include Google Cardboard, which is available on both Android and iOS platforms. It requires only a semi-modern phone capable of meeting the hardware requirements, and a headset (which costs anywhere from free to $100 or more) responsible for holding the phone and allowing for interaction. Another popular product, Samsungs Gear VR, developed in conjunction with Oculus, is tailored to work with certain Samsung phones and is more advanced than the Google Cardboard (though not quite to Oculus levels.)

On the other end of the experience scale, we find headsets that require the user be tethered to a powerful personal computer or gaming console. As of this writing, 2016 has already seen the introduction of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, VR units designed for personal computers.

The two are similar in form and function. The Rift is slightly more comfortable and polished, but the Vive currently ships with tracked motion controllers (wands) that allow you to directly manipulate your virtual environment. The Oculus version of those wands, Touch, was unveiled in October 2016. After Touch ships, the systems will ultimately offer similar experiences, and for the most part be cross compatible.

At this point, most VR experiences do not require hand controllers and are accessible via a game pad. With Rift pricing at $599 and Vive at $799, the cost of entry is steep, although the Vive price does include the controllers. After Oculus releases Touch, the systems should cost about the same. Both headsets are readily available, but youll need a powerful Windows-based computer system to run them (Apple Macintosh systems arent supported). The minimum specs include a modern Intel i5 Core Processor, 8 GB of RAM and a GTX 970 graphics card. Several manufacturers sell VR-ready PCs, typically costing north of $900.

Now that we have a basic understanding of whats involved, lets take a look at some experiences available for amateur astronomers.

Mobile VR

The top two choices are the Google Cardboard, which works for Android and iPhone devices, and Gear VR, which is specific to Samsung devices.

Mobile/desktop

Some overlap exists between mobile and desktop VR. Generally where they exist on both platforms youll find a smoother, higher definition experience with the pricier units and perhaps some added features to boot.

There are a few software outlets. Oculus Home is only for use with a VR headset. Steam is an online software distribution platform available for download via the web. WEARVR, http://www.theriftarcade.com and itch.io are online stores designed for VR software. If software is in early access, it is still under development, and while complete enough for use, it is actively undergoing changes, both to add new content and eradicate bugs. Note that in some cases compatibility for a particular title may require running some extra software.

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Rocketing off to (cyber) space - Astronomy Magazine

Before they were born, these mice were astronauts. Or, rather, the sperm that would go on to deliver half of their genetic material were.

For nine months, mouse sperm was kept aboard the International Space Station, freeze-dried to preserve it. Brought back to Earth, the sperm was rehydrated, introduced to an egg and allowed to divide for about 20 days. The resulting mouse pups carry the distinction of having traveled perhaps the farthest distance ever on their way to being born.

The experiment, from researchers in Japan, was the latest in an ongoing effort to determine how the effects of space travel will impact the creation of new life. The question isnt as academic (or snicker-inducing) as it may seem if humans are ever to make trips to distant planets, the time scales involved will likely necessitate multiple generations of individuals born in space.

Spending time in space carries a unique set of risks, due to factors ranging from the weightless environment to cosmic radiation. Its not really known how well earthly reproductive systems would manage in space, although a few experiments have probed elements of the question. Bothfishandsalamander eggshave been fertilized in space, and a group ofrats were gestatedpartially in microgravity to assess the effects. The fish and salamanders seemed to do fine, and the rats werent harmed much, although they did have difficulty reorienting themselves with respect to gravity.

This study attacked the problem from another angle, looking at what happens when reproductive material is kept in outer space for extended periods of time. So, for three-quarters of a year, astronauts aboard the ISS lived with tubes of mouse sperm aboard the station.

It was eventually brought back and injected into mouse egg cells, which were left to develop normally. The pups went on to grow up healthy and have kids of their own, indicating that little damage had occurred. Compared to mice from freeze-dried sperm that stayed on Earth, the researchers say that the space pupsshowed little signs of mutations or defects.

Thepaperwas published Monday in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers were most interested in the DNA-harming effects of cosmic radiation, which can result in dangerous mutations. While the stellar mouse sperm did turn out to have higher levels of damage, cells at the beginning of gestation have a supercharged ability to make repairs to their DNA. This seems to have made up for all of the damage that the sperm accrued while in space.

This is good news for potential interstellar settlers, for whom space sex will be the reality. This is only a step toward raising stellar babies, however. For starters, the mouse sperm was freeze-dried, which may have affected its resilience. While we can reconstitute mouse sperm and put it into an egg, the same process is not yet feasible for human germ cells. In addition, only half of the chromosomes that madethese mice went into space the eggs remained firmly terrestrial. The effects of actually fertilizing a human egg and gestating a child in space are unknown as well, and probably will be for some time.

That is to say nothing of the physical difficulties of actually getting it on in zero gravity. NASA firmly denies any tests of this nature, although the awkwardness is pretty easy to imagine. Thankfully,theres a suit for that but everything afterwards is up in the air.

This article originally appeared on Discover.

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Mice born from freeze-dried space sperm are doing OK - Astronomy Magazine

Pointing the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at the well-known and often-studied galaxy Cygnus A for the first time in more than 20 years, astronomers got a big surprise, finding that a new object had appeared near the galaxys supermassive black hole.

Artists conception of the newly-discovered object orbiting the main, central supermassive black hole of the galaxy Cygnus A. Image credit: Bill Saxton / NRAO / AUI / NSF.

Cygnus A, also known as LEDA 63932, NRAO 620 and IRAS 19577+4035, was discovered by radio-astronomy pioneer Grote Reber in 1939.

Located 800 million light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the galaxy is one of the strongest radio sources in the sky.

Cygnus A was an early target of the VLA after its completion in the early 1980s. Detailed images from the VLA published in 1984 produced major advances in scientists understanding of the superfast jets of subatomic particles propelled into intergalactic space by the gravitational energy of supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

The VLA images of Cygnus A from the 1980s marked the state of the observational capability at that time, said National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer Dr. Rick Perley, one of the researchers who made the original Cygnus A observations with the VLA in the 1980s.

Because of that, we didnt look at Cygnus A again until 1996, when new VLA electronics had provided a new range of radio frequencies for our observations. The new object does not appear in the images made then.

However, the VLAs upgrade that was completed in 2012 made it a much more powerful telescope, so we wanted to have a look at Cygnus A using the VLAs new capabilities.

The new object may have much to tell us about the history of this galaxy, said Dr. Daniel Perley, an astronomer with the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University and Dr. Rick Perleys son.

The researchers began the new observations in 2015, and continued them in 2016.

To our surprise, we found a prominent new feature near the galaxys nucleus that did not appear in any previous published images, Dr. Rick Perley said.

This new feature is bright enough that we definitely would have seen it in the earlier images if nothing had changed. That means it must have turned on sometime between 1996 and now.

The team then observed Cygnus A with the Very Long Baseline Array in November of 2016, clearly detecting the new object.

What is the new object? Based on its characteristics, the astronomers concluded it must be either a supernova explosion or an outburst from a second supermassive black hole near the galaxys center.

While they want to watch the objects future behavior to make sure, they pointed out that the object has remained too bright for too long to be consistent with any known type of supernova.

Because of this extraordinary brightness, we consider the supernova explanation unlikely, said Dr. Vivek Dhawan, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

While the new object definitely is separate from Cygnus As central supermassive black hole, by 1,500 light-years, it has many of the characteristics of a supermassive black hole that is rapidly feeding on surrounding material.

We think weve found a second supermassive black hole in this galaxy, indicating that it has merged with another galaxy in the astronomically-recent past, said Dr. Christopher Carilli, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

These two would be one of the closest pairs of supermassive black holes ever discovered, likely themselves to merge in the future.

The astronomers suggested that the second black hole has become visible to the VLA in recent years because it has encountered a new source of material to devour.

That material could either be gas disrupted by the galaxies merger or a star that passed close enough to the secondary black hole to be shredded by its powerful gravity.

The research paper reporting this discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint).

_____

Daniel A. Perley et al. 2017. Discovery of a Luminous Radio Transient 460 pc from the Central Supermassive Black Hole in Cygnus A. ApJ, accepted for publication; arXiv: 1705.07901

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Astronomers Spot Bright New Object near Cygnus A Galaxy's ... - Sci-News.com

May 24, 2017 The left is the "new image" from a couple of nights ago while the middle one is the "reference" image taken a couple of years ago, the right image is the difference between "new" and "reference." The researchers said there is clearly an exploding star in the outskirts of the galaxy. Credit: ANU

Online volunteers, including a woman from Belgium and a Scottish man, have helped astronomers at The Australian National University (ANU) find a star that exploded 970 million years ago, predating the dinosaurs' time on Earth.

ANU has invited everyone with an interest in astronomy to join the University's search for exploding stars called supernovae, which scientists can use to measure the Universe and acceleration of its growth.

Co-lead researcher Dr Brad Tucker said his team was able to confirm a previously unknown object was a real exploding star in just a day, thanks to the efficiency and dedication of volunteer supernovae hunters - more than 700 of them.

"The supernova is about 970 million light years away, meaning that it exploded before the dinosaurs were even on the Earth," said Dr Tucker from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA).

"This is the exact type of supernova we're looking for - type Ia supernova - to measure properties of and distances across the Universe."

Among the amateur co-discoverers are Alan Craggs from Aberdeenshire in Scotland and Elisabeth Baeten from Belgium.

Seven potential supernovae have been reported to the Transient Name Server.

"We are tracking 18 other possible exploding stars," Dr Tucker said.

Co-lead researcher Dr Anais Mller said the Ia supernova discovered through the ANU project had already been named.

"Supernovae have boring names - it's called SN2017dxh," said Dr Mller from RSAA.

"We are recognising volunteers by listing the first three people to find a previously unknown supernova in the discovery when we report it to the International Astronomical Union.

"In the first 24 hours we had over 30,000 classifications. We've almost reached 40,000 classifications, with more than 1,300 images classified, since the launch of our project."

Astrophysicists use supernovae, which are explosions as bright as 100 million billion billion billion lightning bolts, as light sources to measure how the Universe is growing and better understand dark energy, the cause of the Universe's acceleration.

Scientists can measure the distance of a supernova from Earth by calculating how much the light from the exploding star fades.

The ANU project allows citizen scientists to use a web portal on Zooniverse.org to search images taken by the SkyMapper 1.3-metre telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory for the SkyMapper Transient Survey.

Citizen volunteers scan the SkyMapper images online to look for differences and mark up those differences for the researchers to follow up.

SkyMapper is the only telescope that is doing a comprehensive survey of the southern sky looking for supernovae and other interesting transient events at these distances.

Watch a video interview with Dr Brad Tucker about the project:

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People can to participate in the ANU citizen science project at http://www.zooniverse.org/projects/skymap/supernova-sighting to join the search for exploding stars.

Explore further: Four unknown objects being investigated in Planet 9 search

Astronomers from The Australian National University (ANU) are investigating four unknown objects that could be candidates for a new planet in our Solar System, following the launch of their planetary search on the BBC's Stargazing ...

ANU is launching a search for a new planet in our solar system, inviting anyone around the world with access to the Internet to help make the historic discovery.

It may soon be possible to detect the universe's first stars by looking for the blue colour they emit on explosion.

More than 40,000 amateur astronomers have classified two million unidentified heavenly bodies found by the SkyMapper telescope at The Australian National University (ANU).

Astronomers have captured the earliest minutes of two exploding stars and for the first time seen a shockwave generated by a star's collapsing core.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe the remnant of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Beyond just delivering a beautiful image, Hubble may well have traced the surviving ...

Combined observations from three spacecraft show that Jupiter's brightest auroral features recorded to date are powered by both the volcanic moon Io and interaction with the solar wind.

NASA's Juno mission, led by Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Scott Bolton, is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about Jupiter specifically, and gas giants in general, according to a pair of Science papers released ...

Methanol, a key building block for the complex organic compounds that comprise life, has been detected for the first time in the protoplanetary disk of a young, distant star. This finding could help scientists better understand ...

Using a system developed under an ESA contract, the Greek NELIOTA project has begun to detect flashes of light caused by small pieces of rock striking the moon's surface. NELIOTA is the first system that can determine the ...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft still has a few months to go before it completes its mission in September, but the veteran Saturn explorer reaches a new milestone today. Saturn's solsticethat is, the longest day of summer in ...

A team of astronomers including Carnegie's Eduardo Baados and led by Roberto Decarli of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has discovered a new kind of galaxy which, although extremely oldformed less than a billion ...

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Volunteers help astronomers find star that exploded 970 million ... - Phys.Org

Cygnus A is an elliptical galaxy nearly 800 million light-years from Earth. In its center is a supermassive black hole at least a billion times the mass of our Sun, which appears to have recently gained a companion. New observations of this galaxy with the National Science Foundations Very Large Array (VLA)have unveiled a second bright object located near its central supermassive black hole an object that radio astronomers think is a second supermassive black hole, destined to merge with the first.

Based on radio observations taken with the VLA in 2015 and 2016, astronomers have spotted a new object within 1,500 light-years of the galaxys supermassive black hole. This object was not visible in previous radio images of the galaxy, the most recent of which prior to the discovery were taken in 1996. It wasnt until recent upgrades were made to the VLA in 2012 that observers considered a return to this famous galaxy, which was discovered by radio astronomy Grote Reber in 1939.

To our surprise, we found a prominent new feature near the galaxys nucleus that did not appear in any previous published images. This new feature is bright enough that we definitely would have seen it in the earlier images if nothing had changed, said Rick Perley of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in a press release announcing the discovery. That means it must have turned on sometime between 1996 and now.

The new radio observations were made by a group of astronomers that included Perley and his son, Daniel Perley of the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., as well as NRAO researchers Vivek Dhawan and Chris Carilli. The results will be published in theAstrophysical Journal.

Following their 2015-2016 observations, the team used the Very Long Baseline Array in late 2016 to more clearly separate the new object from the galaxys previously known supermassive black hole. The new object also shows up in infrared images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and at the Keck Observatory between 1994 and 2002, when it was originally thought to represent a dense group of stars. But the fact that the object has grown brighter in radio wavelengths since then has prompted new consideration.

Now, there are two possibilities based on the data: The new object is either a supernova explosion or a supermassive black hole. Supernovae are massive stellar explosions that are easily seen in distant galaxies. However, Because of this extraordinary brightness, we consider the supernova explanation unlikely, Dhawan said. The object is both too bright and has remained visible for too long to fit any current known supernova type.

Thus, said, Carilli, We think weve found a second supermassive black hole in this galaxy, indicating that it has merged with another galaxy in the astronomically recent past. These two would be one of the closest pairs of supermassive black holes ever discovered, likely themselves to merge in the future.

What does that kind of merger look like? At least two possibilities have recently come to light: the recoiling black holes CXO J101527.2+625911 and 3C 186.

So if this object is a billion-solar-mass black hole, why wasnt it obvious before now? It may not have been as active, and only recently come into contact with new material, such as stars or dust, to accrete, causing it to turn on and give off observable radiation. Further observations will help us resolve some of these questions. In addition, if this is a secondary black hole, we may be able to find others in similar galaxies, said Daniel Perley.

Rick Perley was among the astronomers responsible for the very first observations of Cygnus A when the VLA first came online in the early 1980s. These observations provided the detail necessary for astronomers to begin understanding how supermassive back holes produce jets of materials that can span regions of space larger than their host galaxies. At the time, Daniel was only two years old.

The VLA images of Cygnus A from the 1980s marked the state of the observational capability at that time, said Rick Perley. Because of that, we didnt look at Cygnus A again until 1996, when new VLA electronics had provided a new range of radio frequencies for our observations.

But now that these newest observations have revealed a surprise, Daniel Perley said, This new object may have much to tell us about the history of this galaxy.

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A familiar galaxy with a new surprise: Two supermassive black holes - Astronomy Magazine

Ever since NASA announced that the TRAPPIST-1 system had seven planets instead of the original three, scientists have been interested in learning more about the bizarre system. Now after much research and some suspected details, scientists have found orbital details about the systems farthest planet, TRAPPIST-1h.

Using data from the Kepler spacecraft, scientists studying the exoplanets have confirmed that the outermost planet, about six million miles from the TRAPPIST-1, has a 19-day orbit around its host star.

Studying data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, the team noticed a predictable pattern, also called an orbital resonance, among the first six planets in the system. An orbital resonance is when orbiting bodies show a consistent gravitational influence on each other, like how Jupiters moon Europa orbits twice in the same length of time Ganymede takes to complete four orbits.

The team then used the Spitzer data to calculate six potential resonant periods. After gathering more data, only one of those potential periods remained.

"All of this indicates that these orbital relationships were forged early in the life of the TRAPPIST-1 system, during the planet formation process, Rodrigo Luger, a doctoral student at UW in Seattle and lead author of the study, said in a press release. "The resonant structure is no coincidence, and points to an interesting dynamical history in which the planets likely migrated inward in lock-step. This makes the system a great laboratory for planet formation and migration theories.

NASA has had its eye on the seven-planet system, which orbits the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, since December 2016. The system is somewhere between 3 and 8 billion years old. It was originally thought to only have three planets until Spitzer data revealed four additional planets.

NASAs Hubble Space Telescope is now looking for more information about the planets' atmospheres; when the James Webb Space Telescope launches in October 2018, it will join the search for information about TRAPPIST-1.

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Astronomers know TRAPPIST-1h's orbit - Astronomy Magazine