Space & Astronomy

Nearby extrasolar world may be more suited to alien life than thought

By T.K. Randall
July 7, 2026

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) Situated 25 light-years away, the planet - known as GJ 3378b - was previously thought to be approximately five times more massive than the Earth.

At a glance, its circumstances wouldn't seem to make it much of a candidate for life - it is situated 10 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun and completes an orbit every 21.5 days.

Because its star is a red dwarf (and is much cooler than the Sun), this would seem to place it smack bang in the middle of the habitable zone (in which liquid water can exist on a planet's surface).

It's huge size, however, suggested that it was simply too big to be a rocky terrestrial world.Now, though, new observations using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument attached to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas have indicated that GJ 3378b is actually only 2.3 times the mass of the Earth.

This makes it far more likely to be a terrestrial world with an atmosphere.

"This one's exciting," said study lead author Paul Robertson of the University of California, Irvine.

"25 light-years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, so in that respect it's our next-door neighbor."

Whether there actually is extraterrestrial life on GJ 3378b, however, currently remains a mystery.

Source: Live Science

Tags: Extrasolar, Planet