Astronomers Have Discovered Yet Another Planet Around a Nearby Star
…and soon they can look for signs of life on it.
For more than three years, the MEarth-South observatory, a cluster of telescopes in Chile, has stared at distant stars in the night sky, waiting for a hint of dimming in their brightness, a sign that something—probably a planet—is passing by. In the fall of 2014, the observatory detected a dip in starlight coming from a red dwarf about 39 light-years away from Earth. Unfortunately, no one noticed. The signal, thought to be an imperfection in the data, was tossed out.
