GJ 887 e is the innermost confirmed planet of GJ 887, the brightest red dwarf in our sky, about 10.7 light-years away. It has a minimum mass of about 1.5 Earth masses and circles the star every 4.42 days. It was confirmed in 2026 together with GJ 887 d, a super-Earth in the star's habitable zone, in a study led by C. Hartogh that revisited the two planets found there in 2020.
It is a hard planet to see. It was found by the radial velocity method, which detects the slight back-and-forth motion a planet's gravity gives its star, and GJ 887 e moves its star by less than a metre per second. The team gathered 101 new measurements with the HARPS spectrograph and 12 with ESPRESSO, both operated by the European Southern Observatory, and modelled the star's own variations so they would not be mistaken for planets. That small signal held up as a planet.
The same data show a further signal at 2.22 days, almost exactly half of GJ 887 e's period. Orbits locked in a simple ratio like this, here two to one, are called a resonance, and they are common in compact planet systems. If that signal is a planet, it would have a minimum mass of about half of Earth's. The authors note that other explanations are also plausible, so it remains a candidate. At 4.42 days, GJ 887 e orbits far closer in than the habitable zone, the range of distances where liquid water could last on a surface. Like its siblings, it does not pass in front of its star, so its size and true mass are not known.