GJ 1214 b

(sometimes , formally named Enaiposha) is an exoplanet that orbits the star GJ 1214, and was discovered in December 2009. Its parent star is 48 light-years from the Sun, in the constellation Ophiuchus. As of 2017, is the most likely known candidate for being an ocean planet. For that reason, scientists often call the planet a "waterworld". It is a super-Earth, meaning it is larger than Earth but is significantly smaller (in mass and radius) than the gas giants of the Solar System. After CoRoT-7b, it was the second super-Earth to have both its mass and radius measured and is the first of a new class of planets with small size and relatively low density. is also significant because its parent star is relatively near the Sun and because it transits that parent star, which allows the planet's atmosphere to be studied using spectroscopic methods. In December 2013, NASA reported that clouds may have been detected in the atmosphere of . In August 2022, this planet and its host star were included among 20 systems to be named by the third NameExoWorlds project. The approved names, proposed by a team from Kenya, were announced in June 2023. GJ 1214 b is named Enaiposha and its host star is named Orkaria, after the Maa words for a large body of water and for red ochre, alluding to the likely composition of the planet and color of the star. was first detected by the MEarth Project, which searches for the small drops in brightness that can occur when an orbiting planet briefly passes in front of its parent star. In early 2009, the astronomers running the project noticed that the star GJ 1214 appeared to show drops in brightness of that sort. They then observed the star more closely and confirmed that it dimmed by roughly 1.5% every 1.58 days. Follow-up radial-velocity measurements were then made with the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO's 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile; those measurements succeeded in providing independent evidence for the reality of the planet.