Astronomers studying ultra-cool stars discovered a new, earth-sized planet, just 55 lightyears away, it was announced in a paper published on May 15, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The newly discovered planet - dubbed SPECULOOS-3 b - was discovered by an international team of scientists, involved in the Search for Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars (SPECULOOS) project.
Like the cookie it's named after, the SPECULOOS program has origins in Belgium - but the team also features scientists from the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
"We designed SPECULOOS specifically to observe nearby ultracool dwarf stars in search of rocky planets that lend themselves well to detailed studies," said astronomer Michaël Gillon.
"In 2017, our SPECULOOS prototype using the TRAPPIST telescope discovered the famous TRAPPIST-1 system made up of seven Earth-sized planets, several of them potentially habitable. This was an excellent start."
Ultra-cool stars are abundant in the Milky Way but they're fainter, smaller and colder than our sun. They're also expected to be among the last stars present at the end of the universe, said exoplanetology expert Amaury Triaud according to Phys.org
"The discovery of SPECULOOS-3 shows our worldwide network functions well and is ready to detect yet more rocky worlds orbiting very low mass stars," he said.
While the star may not burn as brightly, the planet itself is still quite warm, receiving 16 times more energy per second than Earth.
"Though this particular red dwarf is more than a thousand times dimmer than the Sun, its planet orbits much, much closer than the Earth, heating up the planetary surface," Steve B. Howell, one of the planet's discoverers told NASA.
