Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet the size of Earth and three times more massive, located 70 light-years from the Sun. The discovery was reported in a paper published in the arXiv preprint database.

Initially, the candidate was identified using NASA’s Kepler space telescope while observing the transit signal, which is the drop in the light curve of the star K2-415 caused by the passage of a large object against the background of the luminaire. The planetary nature of the signal was confirmed during subsequent TESS observations.

The radius of K2-415b is approximately 1,015 Earth radii. The planet orbits its parent star at a distance of about 0.027 AU every 4,018 days. The equilibrium temperature of K2-415b is estimated to be about 400 Kelvin, ignoring the effect of heat accumulation in the atmosphere and the effect of the hot underground.

The star K2-415 is a red dwarf and belongs to the spectral class M5V, and its effective temperature, which characterizes the radiation power of a black body, is 3173 Kelvin. The radius of the star is about 0.2 of that of the Sun and its mass is about 0.16 of that of the Sun, according to calculations.