Astronomers find a pair of ‘super Earths’ in a nearby star system
Two super-Earth exoplanets orbit Gliese 887, 11 light years from Earth. (Mark Garlick/)Space telescopes like Kepler and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have made hunting for exoplanets an industrial pursuit. Their mechanical eyes watch thousands of stars simultaneously, and software efficiently sifts through the mountains of resulting data, highlighting only the most promising stellar flickers and wobbles for manual confirmation. The process has revolutionized planetary science like the assembly line revolutionized manufacturing: just 28 years after the first confirmed exoplanet discovery, NASA’s catalog is bursting with more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets spanning more 3,000 systems. Sandra Jeffers, a researcher at the Institute for Astrophysics at Goettingen University in Germany, is part of a team taking a more bespoke approach, searching nearby stars one by one for high-quality exoplanet targets that could someday be studied directly. Now years of analysis based on decades of data has uncovered one of the...