Hobby-Eberly Telescope Archives

GJ 3378b orbits a small cool red dwarf -- Grok via Astrobiology.com

Nearby “Super Earth” May Be A Better Candidate For Life Than Previously Thought

by Keith CowingJuly 4, 2026July 4, 2026

[UT Austin] Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought. The […]

View from the surface of the habitable-zone super-Earth exoplanet GJ 3378b. The planet has a minimum mass just over twice that of Earth and orbits its star at a distance that causes it to receive almost the same amount of starlight as Earth does. The planet joins a growing population of potential hosts for life in the nearby universe. -- Grok via Astrobiology.com

Exoplanets, -moons, -comets

A New Earth-like Exoplanet Discovered

by Keith CowingJuly 1, 2026July 3, 2026

[UC Irvine] A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Irvine reports the discovery of a new Earth-like exoplanet orbiting a star about 25 light-years from our solar […]

Radial velocity data for GJ 3378. Top: the combined RV time series. The orbit model is shown as a dashed line. Middle: RV residuals to a 1-planet model. Bottom: RVs phase-folded to the period of the exoplanet. Phase-binned RVs are shown as squares. -- astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Biogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

A Revised Mass and Period for the Habitable Zone super-Earth GJ 3378b: A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline

by Keith CowingMay 19, 2026May 19, 2026

The nearby (d=7.7 pc) M4V star GJ~3378 is a target of our radial velocity (RV) exoplanet survey of fully convective stars in the Solar neighborhood with the near-infrared spectrograph HPF […]

An international team of scientists, including researchers at Penn State, dubbed the exoplanet, named GJ 251 c, a “super-Earth” as data suggest it has a rocky composition similar to Earth and is almost four times as massive. Credit: Illustration by University of California Irvine . All Rights Reserved.

Astronomy & Telescopes, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Press Release, Stellar Cartography

Newly Discovered Super-Earth Offers Prime Target In Search For Alien Life

by Keith CowingOctober 27, 2025October 27, 2025

The discovery of a possible “super-Earth” less than 20 light-years from our own planet is offering scientists new hope in the hunt for other worlds that could harbor life, according […]

High contrast imaging data for all targets. In each panel, we show the achieved 5σ contrast limit as a function of angular separation from the host star for each high contrast data set. We also plot 1.4′′ × 1.4′′ postage stamps of the reconstructed z ′ -band NESSI images (right-hand inset in each panel) for all targets and the AO images (left-hand insets) for TOI-5414, TOI-5616, and TOI-5634A and TOI-6034. -- astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

Searching For GEMS: Characterizing Six Giant Planets Around Cool Dwarfs

by Keith CowingAugust 29, 2024August 28, 2024

Transiting giant exoplanets around M-dwarf stars (GEMS) are rare, owing to the low-mass host stars. However, the all-sky coverage of TESS has enabled the detection of an increasingly large number […]

The frame rotates with the planetary mean motion, so the position of observers rotates clockwise, with regions of start, pre, transit, post, and end shown in observations divided by black dotted lines. The logarithm of gas density is shown in the color scale. A low-density but relatively fast stellar wind expands from HAT-P-32 A at the coordinate origin and interacts with the outflow from HAT-P-32 b. The outflow from HAT-P-32 b is stretched into long, column-like tails leading and trailing the planet along the orbital path. These tidal tails are shaped by the advection of slow-moving planetary outflow in the star-planet gravitational field. Credit: M. MacLeod (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and A. Oklopčić (Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam). - McDonald Observatory - ScienceAdvances

Astrochemistry, Astronomy & Telescopes, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Press Release

Astronomers Observe Giant Tails of Helium Escaping Jupiter-Like Planet

by Keith CowingJune 9, 2023June 9, 2023

A team of astronomers has used observations from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory to discover some of the longest tails of gas […]