Confirmed exoplanet · Database record + computed analysis
61 Vir d
A confirmed world orbiting 61 Vir, 27.7 light-years away.
A Neptune-class world
5.11 Earth radii, in the ice-giant size range. At only 22.9 Earth masses for that size, it must be substantially gas or volatile ices: puffy, not rocky.
The orbit
Its year takes 123 Earth days (0.3 Earth years). The orbit is strongly stretched (eccentricity 0.35), so its distance from the star, and with it the climate, swings dramatically.
Temperature and starlight
Its equilibrium temperature (the airless-world estimate) is about 109 °C. Above water's boiling point. It receives 3.5 times the starlight Earth gets.
Its sun
Its star is Sun-like (5,577 K, G5 V; the Sun is 5,772 K). It shares the system with 2 other known planets.
How far is that, really?
At 28 light-years, tonight's light from this system left it around the year 1998. That is close by galactic standards, which makes it a prime target for follow-up telescopes. A Voyager-speed probe would need roughly 490,688 years to get there.
How we found it
It was found by the radial-velocity method: the planet's gravity swings its star in a small circle, and that wobble shows up as a rhythmic Doppler shift in the starlight. The wobble's size gives the planet's minimum mass. The discovery was announced in 2009 from Multiple Observatories.
Everything above is computed from the archive’s measured values for this planet. Where a quantity is missing, the statement is omitted rather than guessed.
About this record
The measured values come from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, and any missing value has not been determined yet; the Atlas never fills gaps with guesses. More standout worlds: Proxima b, TRAPPIST-1e, K2-18 b, 55 Cancri e, and the detection methods that found them all.