Carnegie Fellow Guillem Anglada, along with colleagues from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, has discovered a new extrasolar planet around the very active young star BD+20 1790. The star is an orange K5V, slightly less massive than the Sun, and has unusually high levels of activity, displaying recurrent flares and evidence of large protuberances extending several stellar radii from its surface. The group detected the planet via the spectroscopic method, by measuring the Doppler shift on the star induced by an orbiting low-mass companion. BD+20 1790 is estimated to be between 20 and 60 million years old—the youngest main-sequence star with a candidate planetary companion.

The discovery has already generated much press in Spanish newspapers, including El Periodico, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, ABC, Actualidad Universitaria, and Europa Press. A paper on the findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.