Confirmed exoplanet · Database record + computed analysis
Kepler-62 e
A confirmed world orbiting Kepler-62, 981.3 light-years away.
A super-Earth
1.61 Earth radii. Worlds between Earth and Neptune in size are the most common in the galaxy, yet our Solar System has none, which is why each one matters. With 36.0 Earth masses packed into that size, its density points to rock and iron rather than gas.
The orbit
Its year takes 122 Earth days (0.3 Earth years).
Temperature and starlight
Its equilibrium temperature (the airless-world estimate) is about -3 °C. In the range where, with the right atmosphere, liquid water is conceivable; a real atmosphere could shift the true surface figure a lot (Earth's equilibrium value is −18 °C, yet we average +15 °C). It receives 1.35 times Earth's starlight, the same order as our own world.
Its sun
Its star is an orange K-type (4,925 K), K2 V: cooler and longer-lived than the Sun, a class some astronomers consider ideal for habitability. It shares the system with 4 other known planets.
How far is that, really?
At 981 light-years, tonight's light from this system left it around the year 1044. A Voyager-speed probe would need roughly 17,362,090 years to get there.
How we found it
It was found by the transit method: the planet crosses its star's face on schedule, dimming it by a tiny, repeating fraction. The dip's depth gives the planet's size. The discovery was announced in 2013 from Kepler.
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.
The deep dive
Researched for the Atlas from Wikipedia — Kepler-62e (5,695 characters read) · updated Sep 20, 2026
01 A World on the Edge of the Rocky Limit
Kepler-62e sits at a fascinating and uncomfortable boundary in planetary science. Its radius is measured at 1.61 times that of Earth — just barely above the threshold of 1.6 Earth radii, above which planets are thought more likely to be gaseous rather than rocky. That single tenth of an Earth radius makes an enormous difference to what this world might actually be like. Below the threshold, a planet is expected to have a solid silicate-iron interior, possibly wrapped in liquid water. Above it, the planet may instead resemble a mini-Neptune, holding a thick envelope of hydrogen, helium, or other volatiles with no definite surface at all. Kepler-62e's estimated radius of 1.61 R⊕ (with an uncertainty of ±0.05 R⊕) means that the rocky-world and gaseous-world interpretations are genuinely both on the table. Science cannot yet rule either out, and that ambiguity shapes nearly every other question asked about this planet.
02 Mass, Density, and What the Numbers Allow Deeper
Without a direct radial-velocity measurement, the true mass of Kepler-62e remains unknown. Scientists estimate it at roughly 4.5 Earth masses, but the formal upper limit reaches as high as 18.7 Earth masses — a figure the article itself flags as highly unlikely. The reason it can be dismissed is density: at that upper mass with a radius of 1.61 R⊕, the implied density would be at least approximately 22.54 g/cm³. For comparison, osmium, the densest naturally occurring element on Earth, has a density of about 22.59 g/cm³. A planet made almost entirely of osmium is not a physically plausible outcome of normal planet formation, so the upper limit is treated as a statistical artefact rather than a real possibility. The more moderate estimate of 4.5 Earth masses is consistent with a water-rich rocky body or a volatile-envelope planet, reinforcing that the radius alone cannot settle the composition question.
03 A Cool Star and What That Means for Light
Kepler-62e orbits a K-type star — a star somewhat smaller, cooler, and dimmer than our Sun. Kepler-62 has a mass of 0.69 solar masses and a radius of just 0.64 solar radii. Its surface temperature is 4,925 K, compared with the Sun's 5,778 K, giving it a distinctly orange hue rather than the Sun's yellow-white. The star is also significantly older, at 7 billion years, while our Sun is 4.6 billion years old. Perhaps most importantly for habitability, its luminosity is only 21 percent that of the Sun. This relative faintness is the reason Kepler-62e must orbit so much closer than Earth does — at 0.42 AU — to receive comparable warmth. Even so, the planet ends up receiving roughly 20 percent more stellar energy than Earth gets from the Sun, a surplus that carries real consequences for surface temperatures and atmospheric stability.
04 An Orbit Almost as Tight as Mercury's
Kepler-62e completes one full orbit around its host star every 122.3 days at a distance of approximately 0.42 AU. To put that distance in perspective, Mercury — the innermost planet of our solar system — orbits the Sun at about 0.38 AU, roughly 57 million kilometres from the Sun. Kepler-62e is therefore only slightly farther from its star than Mercury is from ours. Yet because Kepler-62 is so much dimmer than the Sun, that close-in distance actually places Kepler-62e within the habitable zone — the range of distances where liquid water could potentially exist on a planetary surface. The equilibrium temperature of the planet is estimated at 270 K, which is −3 °C or 26 °F, hovering near the freezing point of water under Earth-like assumptions about reflectivity and atmosphere.
05 The 2:1 Resonance with Kepler-62f Deeper
A 2016 study concluded that Kepler-62e and its outer neighbour Kepler-62f are likely locked in a 2:1 orbital resonance. This means that for every two complete orbits that Kepler-62e makes around the star, Kepler-62f completes exactly one. Orbital resonances like this are not coincidences — they arise and persist because the gravitational nudges each planet receives from the other add up in a regular, reinforcing pattern rather than cancelling out randomly. The 2:1 resonance is among the most common in planetary systems; Jupiter and its moon Europa share a similar relationship. For Kepler-62e specifically, the resonance implies a long-term stability to its orbit. It also means that researchers modelling the system's dynamics have a powerful constraint: any proposed orbital configuration must reproduce this resonant relationship, limiting the range of masses and inclinations that are physically plausible.
06 Ocean World or Greenhouse Trap?
Two very different fates are possible for Kepler-62e's surface, and both are genuinely supported by modelling. On one hand, a modelling study suggests that planets in Kepler-62e's size range are, in the majority of cases, completely covered by ocean — no continents, no exposed rock, just a global sea. Given the planet's age of 7 billion years (±4 billion years), its stellar flux of 1.2 ± 0.2 times Earth's, and its radius, a rocky silicate-iron composition with a substantial water component is considered plausible. On the other hand, that same stellar flux — about 20 percent above Earth's — raises a serious concern. Surface temperatures could exceed 350 K (77 °C or 170 °F), which might be enough to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, where increasing water vapour traps ever more heat in a self-reinforcing cycle. The outcome would be a scorched, Venus-like world rather than a habitable ocean.
07 How Kepler-62e Was Found in Transit Data
Kepler-62e was detected using the transit method, in which a planet is revealed by the slight, periodic dimming it causes when it crosses the face of its host star as seen from Earth. NASA's Kepler spacecraft began observing stars on its photometer in 2009, initially surveying 50,000 stars from the Kepler Input Catalog to test the instrument. Kepler-62 was among those stars. The spacecraft then monitored its targets continuously, and observations relevant to this discovery spanned from 13 May 2009 to 17 March 2012. Over nearly three years, the tell-tale dips in brightness recurred approximately every 122 days — matching the orbital period that would be formally confirmed for Kepler-62e. After analysis by the Kepler science team and follow-up at ground-based observatories, the periodic dimming was attributed to a planetary body. The discovery was publicly announced on 18 April 2013.
08 Congressional Hearings and the SETI Connection
The announcement of Kepler-62e generated an unusual degree of public and political attention. On 9 May 2013, just three weeks after the discovery announcement, two subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives convened a hearing titled "Exoplanet Discoveries: Have We Found Other Earths?" The session was prompted specifically by the discovery of Kepler-62f and also discussed Kepler-62e and Kepler-69c. Simultaneously, a special issue of the journal Science was published describing the exoplanet discoveries in detail. Beyond the legislative interest, Kepler-62f and the other planets of the Kepler-62 system were identified as special targets for SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) search programs. This placed Kepler-62e within a select group of worlds where radio observatories, including those seeking to improve on the capabilities of the Arecibo Observatory and the Green Bank Telescope, would be directed.
09 Why Current Telescopes Cannot Characterize It Deeper
At approximately 990 light-years (300 parsecs) from Earth — and described elsewhere in the article as nearly 1,200 light-years when accounting for measurement range — Kepler-62e lies far beyond the reach of any current or near-future telescope capable of detailed planetary characterisation. Its host star, with an apparent magnitude of 13.65, is far too faint to be seen with the naked eye and presents an extremely challenging target for spectroscopic follow-up. The article is explicit: neither current instruments nor the next generation of planned telescopes can determine the planet's actual mass or detect whether it has an atmosphere. The Kepler spacecraft, which found the planet, was designed to stare at a single patch of sky and record transits — it was not built for atmospheric spectroscopy. Future missions such as TESS and CHEOPS will search nearer stars throughout the sky, and those closer planets will then be amenable to study by the James Webb Space Telescope and large ground-based observatories for atmospheric analysis, mass determination, and compositional inference.
10 A Metal-Poor Star and What It Implies Deeper
Kepler-62 is described as somewhat metal-poor, with a metallicity of [Fe/H] = −0.37, meaning it contains only about 42 percent of the iron abundance found in the Sun. In stellar astrophysics, "metals" refers to all elements heavier than helium, and metallicity is a proxy for the raw material available when a planetary system forms. Stars with higher metallicity are statistically more likely to host giant planets, because the protoplanetary disk starts out richer in solid material. A metal-poor host like Kepler-62 therefore makes it somewhat less likely — though far from impossible — that any of its planets accreted large solid cores quickly enough to become gas giants. This context supports the expectation that the five known Kepler-62 planets are relatively modest in mass, and it lends some plausibility to the lower end of the mass estimates for Kepler-62e, though the article notes that the true mass remains unconstrained by observation.
11 Where Kepler-62e Sits in a Five-Planet System
Kepler-62e is the second outermost of five planets discovered orbiting Kepler-62. Its Kepler Object of Interest designation is KOI-701.03, reflecting its place in the cataloguing system used by the Kepler mission. The five-planet architecture around Kepler-62 makes it one of the richer compact multi-planet systems identified by the spacecraft. Within this context, Kepler-62e occupies the inner edge of the star's habitable zone — a position that makes it the warmer of the two potentially habitable planets in the system, with Kepler-62f being the cooler, outer candidate. The coexistence of two planets in or near the habitable zone of the same star was notable at the time of discovery and contributed to the system's prominence in discussions about the frequency of potentially life-supporting environments in the galaxy. The star Kepler-62 lies in the constellation of Lyra, the same small northern constellation that lends its name to the brilliant star Vega.
12 Open Questions That May Take Decades to Answer Deeper
Kepler-62e presents researchers with a cluster of interrelated unknowns that are unlikely to be resolved soon. First and most fundamental is composition: without a measured mass, the distinction between a rocky water-rich world and a volatile-envelope mini-Neptune cannot be settled. Second is atmospheric character: whether the planet retains any atmosphere, and if so whether it is thin and rocky-world-like or thick and reducing like Neptune's, is entirely unknown. Third is the greenhouse question: the 20 percent excess stellar flux relative to Earth's is enough to potentially trigger a runaway greenhouse, but whether that outcome occurs depends sensitively on atmospheric composition, cloud coverage, and planetary albedo — all unmeasured. Fourth is age uncertainty: the system's age is given as 7 ± 4 billion years, a range so wide that it spans from younger than Earth to nearly twice as old, leaving the planet's geological and potential biological history essentially unconstrained. Each of these questions awaits instruments and techniques not yet available.
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.