Overview
- Astronomers report GJ 251c, a rocky world about four times Earth’s mass orbiting the star GJ 251 roughly 18 light-years away.
- The team used high‑precision spectrographs, including the Habitable‑zone Planet Finder and NEID, to track tiny stellar wobbles over nearly 20 years.
- GJ 251c circles its low‑luminosity red‑dwarf host every 53.6 days inside the star’s conservative habitable zone.
- No one has imaged the planet yet, and its surface conditions remain unknown because its atmosphere has not been measured.
- The star’s faint output and the system’s proximity could let next‑generation observatories directly study the planet’s air for gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide.