Also presented at this week’s American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting was the finding of a new multiplanet system just 33 light-years from Earth. Of course, we only tell you about new planetary confirmations if there is something interesting, and in this instance, it’s not the system itself but the confirmation method used that got our attention.

Observed with NASA’s TESS telescope, researchers found possible candidate exoplanets around a cool M-dwarf star cataloged as HD 260655. Normally, the pipeline for confirming exoplanets takes several years and further observations using other telescopes. However, postdoc Michelle Kunimoto decided to comb through already completed observations done at the Keck Observatory and the Calar Alto Observatory.

Keck’s instrument HIRES had been monitoring the star since 1998, and with access granted to data sets by both observatories, the confirmation of two planets in orbit around HD 260655 took only six months. The inner planet is 1.2 times the size of Earth and orbits every 2.8 days; the outer planet is 1.5 times the size of Earth and orbits every 5.7 days.

Both planets are roasting due to their proximity to their parent star, but their nearness to our system makes them excellent candidates for follow-up observations with JWST.

More Information

IAC press release

MIT press release

NASA press release

ORIGINS press release

“The HD 260655 system: Two rocky worlds transiting a bright M dwarf at 10 PC,” R. Luque et al., to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics (preprint)