A team led by Giuseppe Conzo of Italy's Gruppo Astrofili Palidoro, working with collaborators in Italy and Brazil, has detected a new exoplanet orbiting the nearby red dwarf Ross 318 (also known as Gliese 48), located just 28 light-years from Earth. The discovery was reported on May 11, 2026, on the arXiv preprint server.
The planet, Ross 318 b, has a minimum mass of about 6.2 times that of Earth and circles its star every 39.6 days at roughly 0.16 AU. It receives about 58% of the sunlight Earth gets, giving it an equilibrium temperature near 237 K and placing it squarely in the star's conservative habitable zone. Researchers estimate a radius around 1.74 times Earth's.
Its mass suggests Ross 318 b could hold a substantial atmosphere able to redistribute heat from its day side to its likely tidally locked night side. That makes it one of the most promising temperate super-Earths for follow-up atmospheric study, including transmission spectroscopy with the James Webb Space Telescope.