TOI-700 first made headlines when our team announced the discovery of three small planets orbiting the star in early 2020. And perhaps most excitingly, astronomers have now found about a dozen exoplanets that are likely rocky and orbiting within the habitable zones of their respective stars.Īstronomers have even discovered a few systems – like TOI-700 – that have more than one planet orbiting in the habitable zone of their star. Today, there are more than 5,000 known exoplanets, ranging from gas giants to small rocky worlds. In 30 years, scientists have gone from barely being able to detect exoplanets to characterizing key chemical clues in their atmospheres, like water, using facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope. As detection methods and tools have improved, the amount of information scientists can learn about these planets has increased. The field of exoplanet discovery and research has been rapidly evolving ever since.Īt first, astronomers were finding only a few exoplanets each year, but the combination of new cutting-edge facilities focused on exoplanet science with improved detection sensitivity have led to astronomers’ discovering hundreds of exoplanets each year. Credit: ESA From 1 to 5,000Īstronomers discovered the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star in 1995.

Specific methods for detecting exoplanets, like the transit method, which looks for a dip in the light coming from a distant star as a planet passes in front of it, have led to an explosion in the number of known exoplanets. TOI-700 e stands out from many of these other planet discoveries because it is well suited for future studies that could help answer big question about the conditions for life outside the solar system. Instead, researchers are focusing their efforts on finding and studying systems most likely to answer key questions about how planets form, how they evolve, and whether life might exist in the universe.

While it is always exciting to find a new, potentially habitable planet far from Earth, the focus of exoplanet research is shifting away from simply discovering more planets. Habitable planets are those that are just the right distance from their star to have a surface temperature that could sustain liquid water. In fact, TOI-700 e is one of two potentially habitable planets just in the TOI-700 star system.

You’ve probably heard about some of the many other exoplanet discoveries in recent years. TOI-700 e is just over 100 light-years from Earth - too far away for humans to visit - but we do know that it is similar in size to Earth, likely rocky in composition and could potentially support life. We are two of the astronomers who led the discovery of this planet, called TOI-700 e.

These two planets are believed to be tidally locked, meaning one side is always facing their sun, like the Moon does with the Earth.NASA recently announced the discovery of a new, Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a nearby star called TOI-700. The innermost planet, TOI 700 b, orbits the star every 10 days, while TOI 700 c does so every 16 days.

TOI 700 d also orbits in the habitable zone. Planet e is about 10% smaller than planet d, so the system also shows how additional TESS observations help us find smaller and smaller worlds.” “That makes the TOI 700 system an exciting prospect for additional follow up. “This is one of only a few systems with multiple, small, habitable-zone planets that we know of,” said Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who led the work. “But the signal was so faint that we needed the additional year of transit observations to identify it.” “If the star was a little closer or the planet a little bigger, we might have been able to spot TOI 700 e in the first year of TESS data,” said Ben Hord, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park and a graduate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

New exoplanets discovered