Kepler-705 b is a planet about twice Earth's width orbiting a red dwarf about 900 light-years away. It crosses in front of its star every 56.1 days and receives about 73 percent of the light Earth gets from the Sun, at a distance within or near the star's habitable zone, the range of distances where liquid water could last on a surface.
NASA's Kepler space telescope listed it as candidate KOI-854.01. A team led by Timothy Morton validated it in 2016, among 1,284 Kepler planets confirmed by an automated method that weighs each signal against false alarms such as background eclipsing stars. In 2017 a team led by Guillermo Torres examined it again with a different method, BLENDER, along with spectra and high-resolution imaging, and validated it at about 99.75 percent confidence. They calculated its equilibrium temperature, set by starlight alone, at about 265 kelvin.
Their imaging turned up two faint stars extremely close to Kepler-705 on the sky, one only about 0.15 arcseconds away and another closer still. A transit gives a planet's size only in proportion to the star it crosses, so if the planet orbits one of those companions rather than the main star, it would be larger than it appears. The team took that into account, but it adds uncertainty to a planet already near the size where worlds often have thick gas envelopes. Its mass has never been measured, so its makeup is unknown.