TESS and the Super Earth

BD-17 588A in double binary system labeled A

I keep meaning to talk about the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that came online this spring. I will dig deeper into the mission but saw that there was a recent discovery of a rocky exoplanet around the hierarchical binary BD-17 588A, a very cool M3.0 red dwarf about 6.87 parsecs distant (to do the distance calculation yourself just go to the link for 588A and find the parallax in milliarcseconds or mas, convert to arcseconds and take the reciprocal of the value).

The rocky exoplanet is about 1.35 times larger than Earth and an orbital period of 5.35 days. Another interesting aspect to this discovery was the secondary observation utilizing the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) to measure the slight spectral doppler shifts to determine its upper mass limit of 8.4 times the mass of Earth. (More to come on HARPS as well). This is considered one of the closest exoplanets as a prime candidate for a future study of its atmosphere.

You can find the paper here.