Taylor Bell Contributes to New Study Showing Exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 b Has No Atmosphere

BAERI researcher Taylor Bell was part of the team that recently published a paper in Nature that shows the Earth-like exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 b likely has no atmosphere. The study is significant in that the seven-planet TRAPPIST system has three planets (TRAPPIST-1 e, f, and g) in the habitable zone, which is an area around a star where a planet may have liquid water. The TRAPPIST solar system is relatively close to our own, and its planets are some of our best neighboring ‘potentially habitable planet’ candidates. The researchers used data from the James Webb Space Telescope for this study.

The paper’s findings have been widely featured, including by Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, the Los Angeles Times, and NASA. You can read the full Nature article here, and visit our Medium publication to listen to an interview with Bell that we conducted last year about his work.