You can now visit Trappist-1 in Elite Dangerous

It's like they planet.

News by Wesley Yin-Poole Former Editor-in-Chief

Updated on March 27, 2017

Elite Dangerous now has the Trappist-1 system.

In February NASA announced it had detected a record seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a single star, called Trappist-1.

The researchers said all seven could potentially support liquid water on the surface, but only three are within the conventional "habitable" zone where life is considered a possibility.

Trappist-1 is an M8 dwarf red star, which is right at the bottom end of the M class stars, so faint it is only just visible in the most powerful telescopes.

Shortly after the announcement, Frontier boss David Braben said Elite Dangerous' Stellar Forge, the system the game uses to build its gargantuan universe, had already created a system with a brown dwarf in very nearly the same place as NASA found Trappist-1.

Elite Dangerous' Core Sys Sector XU-P A5-0 is 39 light years away from where Trappist-1 was detected - and it even has seven terrestrial worlds around it. Stellar Forge created it because of unaccounted mass (it uses "available mass" from which to generate systems). So, in effect, Elite Dangerous predicted the Trappist-1 system.

Braben suggested Elite Dangerous could provide further hints as to what's out there in the real universe.

"Interestingly the system that came out of Stellar Forge has a couple of moons, and a couple of co-orbiting binary pairs - these things would not (yet) be detected in the occlusion technique, as this is simply detecting the darkening of the stellar disc, but who knows, this might be possible," he said in a post on the Elite Dangerous forum.

Anyway, following the discovery, Frontier tweaked Stellar Forge with the data from NASA so the planets are now the same - and it renamed the system Trappist-1.

The video, below, is a tour of the system by Elite Dangerous YouTuber ObsidianAnt, who compares the game's Trappist-1 with the original procedurally generated system.