45 nearby Earth‑likes cataloged
Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute flagged 45 Earth‑like planets in their stars’ habitable zones — targets mostly within a few tens of light‑years that researchers say are prime for follow‑up in the search for life (x.com).
The results appear in a peer‑reviewed paper titled “Probing the Limits of Habitability: A Catalogue of Rocky Exoplanets in the Habitable Zone,” published March 19, 2026 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. (academic.oup.com) The study’s authors are Abigail Bohl, Lucas Lawrence, Gillis Lowry and Lisa Kaltenegger, with the three student co‑authors listed as undergraduate or recent alumni working under Kaltenegger at Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute. (carlsaganinstitute.cornell.edu) Researchers combined Gaia DR3 parallaxes with records from the NASA Exoplanet Archive to compute habitable‑zone boundaries, then ranked targets by suitability for transmission spectroscopy, light‑curve follow‑up and direct imaging for telescopes including JWST, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, the ELT and future missions such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory and LIFE. (academic.oup.com) (carlsaganinstitute.cornell.edu) The team’s shortlist includes well‑known nearby systems such as Proxima Centauri b and multiple TRAPPIST‑1 worlds, alongside less‑famous candidates like TOI‑715 b, Kepler‑442 b, Kepler‑1652 b, GJ 1061 d, GJ 1002 b and Wolf 1069 b cited as receiving Earth‑like stellar flux. (ras.ac.uk) (phys.org) Published distance measurements show the candidate set spans the very nearest systems—Proxima Centauri b orbits the closest star at ~4.24 light‑years—out to well‑studied red‑dwarf systems such as TRAPPIST‑1 at ~40.7 light‑years and LHS 1140 at ~48.8 light‑years. (science.nasa.gov) (en.wikipedia.org) (stellarcatalog.com) A machine‑readable version of the catalog (including the authors’ Table 1 CSV) has been posted for community use on Zenodo, and the paper supplies prioritization flags for which planets are best for different observing techniques to guide upcoming telescope proposals. (zenodo.org) (academic.oup.com)
