There’s Ross 508 b, and then TOI 700 e, a recently discovered habitable Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the Goldilocks Zone of its star. The rocky planet is 95% of Earth’s size and may also be tidally locked, which means it takes 28 days to orbit its star, placing it in between planet c and d, or the habitable zone.
If TOI 700 e does lie within the optimistic habitable zone, it refers to the range of distances from a star where liquid surface water could be present at some point in a planet’s history. This area would extend to either side of the conservative habitable zone, or the range where liquid water could exist over most of the planet’s lifetime.
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If the star was a little closer or the planet a little bigger, we might have been able to spot TOI 700 e in the first year of TESS data. But the signal was so faint that we needed the additional year of transit observations to identify it,” said Ben Hord, a graduate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
