(Phys.org) Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a team of astronomers from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and elsewhere has detected a new exoplanet.

Designated LHS 475 b, it is about the size of Venus and orbits a nearby M-dwarf star.

TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified nearly 6,400 candidate exoplanets (TESS objects of interest, or TOI), of which 3,031 have been confirmed so far.

Now, a group of astronomers led by CfA’s Kristo Ment reports the discovery of another extrasolar planet with TESS. They reveal that a transit signal was detected in the light curve of LHS 475 — a main-sequence red dwarf belonging to the M3 spectral class. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by follow-up ground-based photometry using the MEarth-South telescope array at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

LHS 475 b has a radius of approximately 0.955 Earth radii and orbits its host every 48.7 hours, at a distance of about 0.02 AU from it. The planet’s equilibrium temperature was estimated to be some 587 K, thus LHS 475 b is likely too hot to be habitable.

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-tess-venus-sized-exoplanet-orbiting-nearby.html