Far beyond our traffic jams, power plants, and rising electric bills, NASA has spotted a new kind of neighbor in space. A rocky “super Earth” called TOI-715 b circles a small red dwarf star about 137 light years away and sits in the so-called habitable zone where temperatures could allow liquid water on the surface.
NASA describes the planet as “ripe for further investigation,” a rare chance to test how a distant world holds on to conditions that might support life.
A super Earth in the Goldilocks zone
TOI-715 b is roughly one and a half times as wide as Earth and about three times as massive. It orbits its star at only a little more than eight percent of the Earth–Sun distance, completing a full lap in just nineteen days. At first glance that sounds like a recipe for a scorched landscape. Yet its host star is an M type red dwarf, much smaller and cooler than our Sun, so the planet still receives a gentle level of starlight that places it inside what scientists call the “conservative habitable zone.”
In simple terms, that zone is the orbital sweet spot where a planet gets neither too much radiation nor too little. NASA notes that this distance could give TOI-715 b “the right temperature for liquid water to form on its surface,” although several other factors would need to line up, especially a suitable atmosphere.
Red dwarfs and fast years
The planet was first picked up by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better known as TESS, which looks for tiny dips in starlight when planets pass in front of their stars. Red dwarfs are ideal targets for this kind of search because small rocky planets can huddle close to them without overheating, and their quick orbits give telescopes many chances to see repeated crossings. In the case of TOI-715 b, a “year” is shorter than a human month.
NASA highlights that red dwarf systems like this are, for now, “the best bet for finding habitable planets.” Their compact architecture helps scientists watch several orbits in a relatively short observing campaign instead of waiting for Earth-style decades. That is a big practical advantage when telescope time is limited and the list of targets keeps growing.
Intriguingly, the same system might host a second, slightly-larger-than-Earth planet that also appears to sit inside the conservative habitable zone. If that world is confirmed, it would become the smallest habitable zone planet discovered by TESS so far.
Habitability is more than distance
So is TOI-715 b a blue ocean world, a frozen snowball, or a parched rock? At this stage, nobody knows. Astronomers can measure its size, mass, and orbit with some confidence, but its atmosphere remains a mystery. NASA is careful to stress that simply sitting in the habitable zone does not guarantee surface water. Cloud cover, greenhouse gases, volcanic activity, and even the planet’s rotation all influence whether liquid water can pool or only exist as ice or steam.
For climate scientists, that complexity feels familiar. On Earth, a modest rise in carbon dioxide already shifts temperatures, melts ice, and drives stronger heat waves, even though our planet has not left its own Goldilocks band around the Sun. The lesson is sobering. Distance from a star sets the stage, but gases like CO₂ and methane decide how comfortable the show really feels.
A future target for Webb and climate chemistry
TOI-715 b now joins a short list of rocky planets that the James Webb Space Telescope could study in detail. Webb is designed to separate starlight from the faint light that filters through or radiates from an exoplanet atmosphere. With repeated observations, scientists can search for signatures of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases.
This kind of work is already underway on other worlds. In a recent study, astronomers using Webb found strong evidence for an atmosphere around the ultra hot super Earth TOI-561 b and described it as “a wet lava ball.” That planet is far too hot for life as we know it, but the techniques used there can be applied to cooler targets like TOI-715 b. Step by step, researchers are learning how different atmospheres survive or erode under harsh stellar radiation.
What this distant world tells us about Earth
Most of us will never see TOI-715 b through a backyard telescope. The star is too faint, and the planet is only a dark speck even for our most powerful observatories. Yet its discovery still reaches into everyday life. The same physics that will one day reveal its sky and climate are the tools scientists use to model Earth’s response to greenhouse gases and to predict how far we can push emissions before our own climate leaves the comfortable range that allowed cities, crops, and coral reefs to flourish.
Renyu Hu, an exoplanet researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, summed up the appeal of such worlds by saying “they are indeed very exciting planets.” Part of that excitement comes from the possibility that one of them may host life. Another part comes from the reminder that habitable conditions are not automatic, even in the right orbital zone.
At the end of the day, TOI-715 b is a cosmic mirror. It shows us a nearby world that may be roughly the right size, at roughly the right distance, circling a modest star. Whether it is actually welcoming depends on chemistry, air, and water. On Earth, those same ingredients are now in our hands.
The main scientific study describing TOI-715 b was published on the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
