Plausible Compositions of the Seven TRAPPIST-1 Planets Using Long-term Dynamical Simulations

Understand

TRAPPIST-1 is a nearby ultra-cool dwarf that is host to a remarkable planetary system consisting of seven transiting planets.

• The orbital properties and radii of the planets have been well-constrained, and recently the masses of the inner six planets have been measured with additional ground and space-based photometric observations.
• Large uncertainties in these mass measurements have prevented a robust analysis of the planetary compositions.
• Here we perform many thousands of N-body dynamical simulations with planet properties perturbed from the observed values and identify those that are stable for millions of years.