Depth 27 · Temperate rocky world

TRAPPIST-1e

TRAPPIST-1e is the fourth of seven Earth-sized planets circling TRAPPIST-1, a small, cool star about 40 light-years away. It orbits in the zone where liquid water could exist on the surface if the planet has an atmosphere, which makes it one of the most closely studied worlds beyond the solar system.

Fact sheet

Type: Earth-sized, likely rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of an ultracool red dwarf
Distance: About 40.7 light-years from the Sun
Size: About 0.92 times Earth's radius and 0.69 times Earth's mass
Constellation: Aquarius
Position in the sky: Right ascension 23h 07m, declination −5° 02′
Seeing it from Earth: Not visible to the naked eye or binoculars: TRAPPIST-1 is a very faint red star in Aquarius that needs a large telescope, and its planets are known only from the dips they cause when crossing the star.
On the voyage: Depth 27, in the Nearby stars section of the route, between Vega and the Pleiades

Things to know

TRAPPIST-1e circles its star every 6.1 days at only about 0.03 times the Earth-Sun distance. NASA
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope watched the star almost nonstop for 500 hours in 2016, and in 2017 the team announced seven planets, three of them (e, f and g) in the habitable zone. NASA
The star is so dim that it gives off only about 0.05% of the Sun's energy, and the system is named after TRAPPIST, a small telescope in Chile that found its first planets. NASA
Webb's first four transit observations of planet e, published in 2025, make an original hydrogen-rich atmosphere or a thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere unlikely, but a thinner secondary atmosphere is still possible. NASA
Like its siblings, TRAPPIST-1e is thought to be tidally locked, with one side always facing its star. NASA

Sources

Reach depth 27 on a voyage to fly past TRAPPIST-1e yourself. Every right answer warps your ship one stop deeper.

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