About TRAPPIST-1 b:
- It is a hot rocky exoplanet orbiting an ultracool red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1.
- It is the innermost of seven known planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
- It has 1.4 times the mass and 1.1 times the radius of Earth.
- It orbits its star at a distance of 0.011 astronomical unit (AU), completing one circuit in just 1.51 Earth days.
- It receives about four times the amount of energy that Earth gets from the Sun.
- TRAPPIST-1b is tidally locked, meaning that one side of the planet always faces the star, and one side looks away.
What is an astronomical unit (AU)?
- An AU is the average distance between Earth and the Sun, which is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometres.
- It is usually used to measure distances within our Solar System.
