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Astronomers discover an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting a nearby ultracool dwarf star

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2024-06-16 01:30:04

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Discovery transit photometry of SPECULOOS-3 b. Credit: Gillon et al., 2024.

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new Earth-sized exoplanet that orbits an ultracool dwarf star located just 54.6 light years away. The newfound alien world, designated SPECULOOS-3 b, is slightly smaller but much hotter than our planet. The finding was reported in a paper published May 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The Search for Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars (SPECULOOS) project aims to find potentially habitable exoplanets around some of the smallest and coldest stars of the solar neighborhood. It employs a network of six robotic 1-m-aperture telescopes: the four telescopes of the SPECULOOS-South Observatory (SSO) in Chile, Artemis, the first telescope of the SPECULOOS-North Observatory (SNO) in Tenerife, and the SAINT-EX telescope in San Pedro Martir Observatory in Mexico.