Super-Earths are more habitable than Earth- astronomers think there are billions of them
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Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system – they’re called exoplanets.
Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system – they're called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found a few particularly interesting planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars. One planet is 30% larger than Earth and orbits its star in less than three days. The other is 70% larger than the Earth and might host a deep ocean. These two exoplanets are super-Earths – more massive than the Earth but smaller than ice giants like Uranus and Neptune. I'm a professor of astronomy who studies ...