While studying GJ 1214b, researchers tracked the planet through nearly its entire orbit over the course of about 40 hours, according to NASA. The planet's year takes only 1.6 Earth days.

Researchers observed exoplanet GJ 1214b's atmosphere by measuring the heat it emits while orbiting its host star. Astronomers directly detected the light emitted by a sub-Neptune exoplanet -- a ...

For more than a decade, astronomers have been trying to get a closer look at GJ 1214b, a planet 40 light-years away from Earth. Their biggest obstacle is a thick layer of haze that blankets the ...

GJ 1214b is a strange planet. It has a radius about 2.7 times that of Earth and a mass roughly eight times greater. It’s bigger than a rocky planet, but not big enough to be a gas giant ...

In their Nature paper, the researchers measured the infrared light that GJ 1214b emitted over the course of about 40 hours—the time it takes the planet to orbit its star.

It looks like GJ 1214b might have an atmosphere that's made mostly out of water." That pushes this planet into "a category of its own in a way that was never certain before," says Kreidberg.

The new findings fascinated planet researcher Laura Kreidberg, with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who wasn't part of this research team but who has used the Hubble Space Telescope ...

She says astronomers have zeroed in on GJ 1214b in particular because it's the single-most accessible planet like this to observe. It orbits a small yet bright star that's relatively nearby, just ...