An international team of scientists from Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Denmark identified the planet based on data captured by NASA’s Kepler space telescope in 2017.
According to Dr. Chelsea Huang, a researcher at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, the planet’s orbit is similar to Earth’s, about 355 days.
Researchers believe there is a 50 percent chance that the planet is located in the star’s habitable zone.
“What’s really exciting about this Earth-sized planet is that its star is just [körülbelül] It is 150 light years from our solar system”
said Huang, one of the co-authors of the research.
“The next best planet in the habitable zone around a Sun-like star, a [Kepler-186f] it is about four times farther away and 20 times fainter.”
#Kepler data point to a possible Earth-sized #ExoplanetHD 137010 b, orbiting a sun-like star 146 light-years away. Despite its size, it may be far colder than Mars and awaits further confirmation. @NASA @AAS_Office
— Phys.org (@physorg_com) January 28, 2026
HD 137010 bt was discovered when it briefly passed in front of its star, causing a small dimming. This faint signal was originally detected by a team of citizen scientists, including the study’s first author, Dr. Alexander Venner, who was still in high school at the time.
The team’s first reaction to the discovery was “this can’t be true,” Huang said. “But we double-checked, triple-checked everything, and… it’s a textbook example of a planetary transit.”
The star that HD 137010 b orbits is cooler and fainter than our sun, meaning the planet’s surface temperature is more like that of Mars, potentially below -70°C.
Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University who was not involved in the research, said the discovery was “very exciting” but that further investigation was needed before the candidate planet could be classified as an exoplanet.
According to Webb, the planet may be “a super snowball, essentially a big, icy world with potentially a lot of water, but most of it frozen.”
Although the planet is “very close to the large system of our galaxy,” Webb said, “if we were to try to get there at our current speed, it would take tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years.”
(Guardian/Weeks)
