Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2025

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 NASA’s James Webb Space Tele- scope, it does not have an Earth-like atmosphere. “Ultimately, we want to know if something like the envi- ronment we enjoy on Earth can exist elsewhere, and under what condi- tions. While NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is giving us the abil- ity to explore this question in Earth- sized planets for the first time, at this point we can rule out TRAPPIST- 1 d from a list of potential Earth twins or cousins,” said Caroline Pi- aulet-Ghorayeb of the University of Chicago and Trottier Institute for Re- search on Exoplanets (IREx) at Uni- versité de Montréal, lead author of the study published in The Astro- physical Journal. The TRAPPIST-1 sys- tem is located 40 light-years away and was revealed as the record- holder for most Earth-sized rocky planets around a single star in 2017, thanks to data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and other observatories. Due to that star being a dim, relatively cold red dwarf, the “habitable zone” or “Goldilocks zone” lies much closer to the star than in our solar system. T he exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 d in- trigues astronomers looking for possibly habitable worlds beyond our solar system because it is similar in size to Earth, rocky, and resides in an area around its star where liquid water on its surface is theoretically possible. But according to a new study using data from by NASA/ESA/CSA Laura Betz, Hannah Braun Webb narrows atmospheric possibilities for TRAPPIST-1 d