GJ 357 d: NASA’s TESS Discovers 1st Nearby Super-Earth

Scientists have characterised the first potentially habitable world outside our own solar system located about 31 light-years away.

Key Features

• The super-Earth planet named GJ 357 d was discovered in early 2019 owing to NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission designed to comb the heavens for exoplanets.
• The exoplanet is more massive than our own blue planet, and the discovery will provide insight into Earth’s heavyweight planetary cousins.
• Last February, the TESS satellite observed that the dwarf sun GJ 357 dimmed very slightly every 3.9 days, evidence of a transiting planet moving across the star’s face.
• That planet was GJ 357 ....