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| Three Earth-Mass Planets Discovered Just 12 Light-Years Away
Scientists have discovered the closest multi-planet system around a red dwarf star to Earth. While these planets are unlikely to be habitable, they could be important worlds for future study. The three planets (b, c, and d) were discovered around a red dwarf called YZ Ceti. It's located 12 light-years away from us. They are all similar in mass to our planet, ranging from 0.75 times Earth's mass for the innermost planet, to 0.98 for the middle, and 1.14 for the outermost. A paper describing the findings is available on arXiv, led by Nicola Astudillo-Defru from the University of Geneva, and has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters. Like most red dwarf planets, they orbit much closer to their star than other planets orbiting Sun-like stars. Here, the innermost is about 0.016 AU away (1 AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun), the middle is 0.021 AU and the outermost is 0.028 AU. The orbits take 1.97, 3.06, and 4.66 days, respectively. The discovery was