NASA retired the Kepler space telescope in November 2018, but astronomers are still analyzing the data obtained from it. Recently, astronomers found an exoplanet hidden in the dataset captured by the telescope during 2010-2013. This planet is called Kepler-1649c, turned out to be one of the most Earth-like exoplanets in size and temperature found in the Kepler project.

Kepler-1649c is a rocky planet located 300 light-years from Earth. It is about 1.06 times larger than the Earth and receives 75% of the amount of light from its star as the Earth does from our Sun. Moreover, it is sitting right in the habitable zone of its system, in which the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on the planet. However, Kepler-1649c is orbiting a red dwarf star (Kepler-1649). This type of star has very active solar flares that would make any potential life of Kepler-1649c very challenging. At this stage, it would not be able to tell if there is any possible alien life on Kepler-1649c.

The Kepler space telescope is dedicated to finding exoplanets using the transit method. As it had obtained a huge amount of data, astronomers used an algorithm to identify "false positives" signals. A group of astronomers are taking a second look at all the processed data to weed out any mislabelled data. Kepler-1649c is a planet that got misidentified before.

More information: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/earth-size-habitable-zone-planet-found-hidden-in-early-nasa-kepler-data