Look out, everyone: There’s a new exoplanet in town.
An international team of researchers searching for transiting exoplanets (those that cross their host star’s face from our perspective) has made its latest discovery — an Earth-size body just 72 light-years away from us.
K2-415b, as the newly discovered world has been named, orbits the nearby red dwarf star K2-415. Researchers identified the exoplanet in the data of NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope, its secondary mission K2, and its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. While K2-415b is not the closest known exoplanet to Earth, it is, on a cosmic scale, one of our close neighbors. And it’s a particularly intriguing exoplanet for astronomers to study.
more at space.com
