While we continue to labor over the question of planets around Alpha Centauri A and B, Proxima Centauri -- that tiny red dwarf with an unusually interesting planet in the habitable zone -- remains a robust source of new work. It’s surely going to be an early target for whatever interstellar probes we eventually send, and is the presumptive first destination of Breakthrough Starshot. Now we have news of a possible second planet here, though well outside the habitable zone. Nonetheless, Proxima Centauri c, if it is there, commands the attention. A new paper offers the results of continuing analysis of the radial velocity dataset that led to the discovery of Proxima b, work that reflects the labors of Mario Damasso and Fabio Del Sordo, who re-analyzed these data using an alternative treatment of stellar noise in 2017. Damasso and Del Sordo now present new evidence, working with, among others, Proxima Centauri b discoverer Guillem Anglada-Escudé, and incorporating astrometric data from...

We rightly celebrate exoplanet discoveries from dedicated space missions like TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), watching the work go from initial concept to first light in space and early results. But let's not forget the growing usefulness of older data, tapped and analyzed in new ways to reveal hidden gems. Thus recent work out of the Carnegie Institution for Science, where Fabo Feng and Paul Butler have mined the archives of the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph survey of 33 nearby red dwarf stars, a project operational from 2000 to 2007. The duo have uncovered five newly discovered exoplanets and eight more candidates, all found orbiting nearby red dwarf stars. Two of these are conceivably in the habitable zone, putting nearby stars GJ180 and GJ229A into position as potential targets for next-generation instruments. Both of these stars host super-Earths (7.5 and 7.9 times the mass of Earth), with orbital periods of 106 and 122 days respectively. Like the...

As if I don't have enough trouble figuring out acronyms, I now have to figure out how to pronounce acronyms. The issue comes up because a new NASA instrument now in use at Kitt Peak National Observatory is a spectrograph built at Penn State called NEID. Now NEID stands for NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy. Here we have an acronym within an acronym, for NN-EXPLORE itself stands for the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research partnership that funds NEID. Here's the trick: The acronym NEID is not pronounced 'NEE-id' or 'NEED' but 'NOO-id.' The reason: Kit Peak is on land owned by the Tohono O'odham nation, and the latter pronunciation honors a verb that means something close to 'to see' in the Tohono O'odham language. As a person fascinated with linguistics, I'm delighted to see this nod to a language whose very survival is threatened by the small number of speakers (count me as one infinitely cheered by the resurrection of Cornish, for example). And as...

Among the discoveries announced at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Hawaii was TOI 700 d, a planet potentially in the habitable zone of its star. TOI stands for TESS Object of Interest, reminding us that this is the first Earth-size planet the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has uncovered in its data whose orbit would allow the presence of liquid water on the surface. The Spitzer instrument has confirmed the find, highlighting the fact that Spitzer itself, a doughty space observatory working at infrared wavelengths, is nearing the end of its operations. Thus Joseph Rodriguez (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian): "Given the impact of this discovery - that it is TESS's first habitable-zone Earth-size planet - we really wanted our understanding of this system to be as concrete as possible. Spitzer saw TOI 700 d transit exactly when we expected it to. It's a great addition to the legacy of a mission that helped confirm two of the TRAPPIST-1...

TOI 1338b is a great catch, a circumbinary world that turned up in TESS data and was announced at the ongoing meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Hawai'i. Ravi Kopparapu (NASA GSFC) describes the discovery process in the essay below. The system lies 1,300 light years out in the constellation Pictor, with the planet transiting the larger star. Dr. Kopparapu's work on exoplanet habitability is well known to Centauri Dreams readers. See, for example, his How Common Are Potential Habitable Worlds in Our Galaxy?, which ran in 2014. He followed this up with a look at an unusual multi-planet system (Ravi Kopparapu: Looking at K2-72). Analyzing habitable zone possibilities around different kinds of stars, as well as modeling and characterizing exoplanet atmospheres, plays a major role in his research interests. Here Dr. Kopparapu tells us about the new world and the significant role of an intern in its discovery, reminding us that the opportunities for young scientists to make a...