Illustration of TRAPPIST-1 Planets as of Feb. 2018

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Caption:

This illustration shows the seven Earth-size planets of TRAPPIST-1, an exoplanet system about 40 light-years away, based on data current as of February 2018. The image shows the planets' relative sizes but does not represent their orbits to scale. The art highlights possibilities for how the surfaces of these intriguing worlds might look based on their newly calculated properties.

The seven planets of TRAPPIST-1 are all Earth-sized and terrestrial. TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf star in the constellation Aquarius, and its planets orbit very close to it.

In the background, slightly distorted versions the familiar constellations of Orion and Taurus are shown as they would appear from the location of TRAPPIST-1 (courtesy of California Academy of Sciences/Dan Tell).

For additional information on the Kepler and the K2 mission, visit www.nasa.gov/Kepler .

Background Info:

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech, also in Pasadena. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at Caltech/IPAC. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For additional information about the Spitzer mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer and http://spitzer.caltech.edu .

For additional information about exoplanets, visit https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/ .

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