This is John Batcher with my colleague David Livingston, Dr. Space.

On Hotel Mars we speak with a NASA astronomer Steve Howell about a new exoplanet

discovery. Speculous is the name of the Red Dwarf Star, only 55 light years from Earth. It has one planet now of great interest called Speculos 3B. Speculos, by the way, is a cookie very popular in

Northern Europe. Speculos 3B is roughly Earth-size. Goes around the Red dwarf every 17 days.

Why is of interest is what Steve explains.

And what it tells us about more planets we're going to find

about around red dwarfs, the most commonplace of all stars in our

galaxy, perhaps in the universe.

Our star, the sun, is a yellow dwarf, much hotter than a red dwarf. Here's Steve Hall of NASA explaining

Speculos 3B and the search for life, conditions of life, something that might sustain life.

It wasn't so hot.

More of this later.

No, this planet is not going to probably have any kind of life or liquid water on its surface. In fact, it's probably not even going to have an atmosphere.

It's 500 and some degrees on its surface, so it's very, very hot. So any atmosphere or any water would have boiled away.

So this planet will not be a planet where we think life could be,

but the advantage of it being so hot is the planet itself is fairly bright.

So we'll be able to study the actual composition of the surface of a planet that's roughly the size of the earth and find out if it does have any

little atmosphere or if it's made of the same rocky material that the earth is

made of.