In a solar system called TRAPPIST-1, 40 light years from the sun, seven Earth-sized planets revolve around a cold star.
, have fueled hopes of finding potentially habitable environments beyond our solar system.
The team found compelling evidence that stellar contamination plays a crucial role in shaping the transmission spectra of TRAPPIST-1 b and, likely, the other planets in the system. The central star's activity can create"ghost signals" that may fool the observer into thinking they have detected a particular molecule in the exoplanet's atmosphere.
MacDonald played a key role in modeling the impact of the star and searching for an atmosphere in the team's observations, running a series of millions of models to explore the full range of properties of cool starspots, hot star active regions andNo significant atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1 b To account for the impact of stellar contamination, the team conducted two independent atmospheric retrievals, a technique to determine the kind of atmosphere present on TRAPPIST-1 b, based on observations. In the first approach, stellar contamination was removed from the data before they were analyzed. In the second approach, conducted by MacDonald, stellar contamination and the planetary atmosphere were modeled and fit simultaneously.
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