Kepler-1653 b is a planet about 2.2 times Earth's width orbiting an orange dwarf star about 2,500 light-years away, in or near its habitable zone, the range of distances where a planet could keep liquid water on its surface. Kepler-1653 b crosses in front of its star every 140 days and receives about 98 percent of the light Earth gets from the Sun.
It was given its name in 2017 by a team led by Guillermo Torres, who validated it as a planet. Until then it was listed as Kepler candidate KOI-4550.01. Most small Kepler planets cannot be weighed, so the team showed statistically, with a method called BLENDER, that a planet explains the dips in starlight far better than any false alarm, such as an eclipsing pair of background stars. They also used spectra and high-resolution images of the star, and reached about 99.94 percent confidence. It was one of two planets in that study newly validated and named, along with Kepler-1652 b.
The team's imaging found a star about one arcsecond from Kepler-1653, close enough to blend with it in Kepler's data. A transit reveals a planet's size only in proportion to the star it crosses, so they allowed for the chance that the planet circles that companion and is larger than it appears. They estimated its equilibrium temperature, set by starlight alone, at about 284 kelvin. At over twice Earth's width, it may have a thick envelope of gas rather than a rocky surface, and its mass has never been measured.