An Earth-Sized Exoplanet in Our Cosmic Neighborhood

Discovering an exoplanet isn’t what it used to be. Since the first detection of a planet around another star in 1995, astronomers have found thousands more, thanks in large part to the Kepler Space Telescope, which—truly an overachiever—has discovered nearly 5,000 potential worlds and verified about half of them. Even the discovery of the most exciting kind of exoplanet—an Earth-sized world orbiting inside a star’s habitable zone—has become routine: Kepler has confirmed the existence of more than 30 of them.

But that doesn’t mean the discoveries are boring.

A rocky planet similar in size and temperature Wednesday. The star is a red dwarf, a type of star that is smaller and cooler than stars like our sun, located just 11 light-years from our solar system.