A Planet Unlike Any in Our Solar System
“We’ve found very few planets like this in the habitable zone, and many fewer around a quiet star, so this is rare,” said astronomer Stephen Kane, at UC Riverside’s NASA-funded Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center about super-Earth rocky planet, dubbed TOI-270b, closely orbiting an M-dwarf star with 40% the mass of our Sun. The planet takes only 3.4 days to complete one orbit. “We don’t have a planet quite like this in our solar system.”