EU fact of the week
date: 24/02/2017
A revolutionary EU-funded project leads to the discovery of seven planets
An ambitious EU-funded project – SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing Ultra-cOOl Stars) – led to the discovery of a new system of planets, Trappist-1, on 22 February (see picture of the week). Trappist-1 is composed of seven planets of the same size as the Earth which can shelter water on their surfaces. NASA helped discover the planets. The system hosts the most terrestrial planets and the biggest number of potentially habitable planets ever discovered. After this first discovery, SPECULOOS aims to detect more systems of this type, thanks to four telescopes currently being installed on the European Southern Observatory of Paranal (ESO) in Chile that will be able to observe more targets than this prototype.
The European Research Council funded by nearly €2 million (£1.7m) the work of Belgian researcher Michaël Gillon whose team discovered the new system of planets.