For fifteen years, astronomers studied the faint wobble of a single star. Hidden in that long record was a planet that had never been confirmed before. Its name is Ross 318 b.
On May 11, 2026, an Italian and Brazilian team announced the discovery of a temperate super-Earth orbiting Ross 318, a small red dwarf star roughly 28 light-years from Earth. The planet has a minimum mass of about 6.2 times that of Earth, and it sits inside the habitable zone, the area around a star where a rocky world could hold liquid water on its surface.
Red dwarfs like Ross 318 are the most common and dimmest stars in the galaxy. Ross 318 b orbits very close to its star at only about 0.16 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, completing a full orbit in roughly 39.6 days. Yet the planet receives only about 58 percent of the sunlight Earth gets.
The planet was not seen directly. Scientists used the radial-velocity method, where a planet's gravity causes its star to wobble slightly. Data came from two instruments: CARMENES at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain and HIRES at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. NASA's TESS satellite also watched the star for 218.6 days but found no sign of the planet crossing in front of its star.
Finding this planet was difficult because Ross 318 is magnetically active, creating noise that can hide a real planet. Separating a genuine planet from that turbulence across fifteen years was the main challenge.
One important detail: the planet is likely tidally locked, keeping one side always facing the star and the other in eternal darkness. Whether life could exist there depends on whether it has a thick atmosphere. The team hopes to study the planet's atmosphere using the James Webb Space Telescope.