This newly-discovered super-Earth is located near habitable zone of red dwarf star

Scientists, using the infrared spectrograph IRD on the Subaru Telescope (IRD-SSP), have discovered a super-Earth around a red dwarf star - stars smaller than the Sun - about 37 light-years away from the Earth.

This newly-discovered exoplanet, Ross 508 b, is located at the inner edge of the habitable zone around a red dwarf star called Ross 508, which is one-fifth the mass of the Sun. With about four times the mass of the Earth, this exoplanet has a year of only 11 Earth-days.

Planets in the habitable zone could retain water on their surfaces and may harbor life, therefore Ross 508 b will be an important target for future observations to verify the possibility of habitability on planets around red dwarfs, the researchers said.

"Ross 508 b is the first successful detection of a super-Earth using only near-infrared spectroscopy. Prior to this, in the detection of low-mass planets such as super-Earths, near-infrared observations alone were not accurate enough, and verification by high-precision line-of-sight velocity measurements in visible light was necessary. This study shows that IRD-SSP alone is capable of detecting planets, and clearly demonstrates the advantage of IRD-SSP in its ability to search with a high precision even for late-type red dwarfs that are too faint to be observed with visible light." says Dr Hiroki Harakawa (NAOJ Subaru Telescope), the lead author of the discovery paper.

Red dwarfs are important targets in the search for nearby extra-solar planets and extraterrestrial life, but they are difficult to observe because they are too faint in visible light. The InfraRed Doppler instrument mounted on the Subaru Telescope can observe the infrared (IR) light emitted strongly by red dwarf stars.

The Subaru Telescope is a large optical-infrared telescope operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, National Institutes of Natural Sciences with the support of the MEXT Project to Promote Large Scientific Frontiers. It is located on the Big Island of Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 6,500 km from Japan.