TRAPPIST-1’s Fatal Flaw Could Ruin Our Hopes of Finding Life There

Short form: 80 straight days of close examination of the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 showed 42 sizable solar flare events. Solar flares on a red dwarf are generally *relatively* more spectacular than they are on a larger star like the Sun… and the planets are far, far closer. The end result is that the X-ray flash from the flares can fry the planetary surfaces and strip their atmospheres.

So the chances of Earth-like conditions just took a bit of a tumble. On the other hand, these sort of flares probably wouldn’t mean much to a Europa-like world… colder than Earth, a deep planetary ocean frozen over on the surface but with kilometers of water underneath. How such a world might exist in a system like this is a bit of a head-scratcher, though. Europa keeps its ocean liquid due to tidal forcing from orbiting Jupiter; the planets of TRAPPIST-1 orbit far further from their star, and the tidal forces would be substantially lower.