Teegarden’s Star b: a nearby Earth-like world in the habitable zone with an atmospheric mystery
Teegarden’s Star b is a rocky planet at least 1.16 Earth masses, orbiting a faint red dwarf 12.5 light-years away in the star’s habitable zone. While it ranks among the most Earth-like in mass and irradiation, it does not transit its star, blocking the primary method for reading an atmosphere via transmission spectroscopy. The planet’s true mass and whether it has an atmosphere remain unresolved, with next‑generation observatories—such as the ELT's Planetary Camera and Spectrograph and a proposed LIFE interferometer—needed to study its light directly and potentially detect an atmosphere.
