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Astronomers Find Temperate Super-Earth Just 18 Light-Years Away in Star's Habitable Zone

An international team of astronomers has detected Ross 318b, a temperate super-Earth orbiting within the habitable zone of the nearby red dwarf star Ross 318, placing it among the closest potentially life-hosting worlds yet discovered. The planet has a minimum mass of 6.21 Earth masses and completes one orbit every 39.6 days, receiving about 58 percent of the solar energy Earth gets from the Sun - conditions under which liquid water could exist on a rocky surface. The discovery, published on arXiv on May 11, 2026, relied on 15 years of precise radial velocity measurements from the CARMENES and HIRES spectrographs.