We present a comprehensive catalog of the dippers—young stellar objects that exhibit episodic dimming—derived from one year’s worth of data of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) full-frame images. In the survey, we found 35 dippers using the convolutional neural network, most of them newly discovered. Although these dippers are widely distributed over the first half-hemisphere that TESS surveyed, we identified the majority’s membership with the nearest association Scorpius–Centaurus, Velorum OB2, and the nearby Orion molecular cloud complex. However, several dippers are likely to be located in the field. We also found three old dippers whose age exceeds 10 million years, which is considered to be the disk dissipation time. The color–color diagram indicates that these old dippers are likely to have an extreme debris disk. In particular, we found a runaway old dipper having a large three-dimensional velocity of 72 km s−1. The dippers in the field, which were probably escaping from their birth molecular clouds or were born outside the current area of star-forming regions, are more common than previously considered.

We report the near-infrared radial velocity (RV) discovery of a super-Earth planet on a 10.77 d orbit around the M4.5 dwarf Ross 508 (Jmag = 9.1). Using precision RVs from the Subaru Telescope IRD (InfraRed Doppler) instrument, we derive a semi-amplitude of $3.92^{+0.60}_{-0.58}\:\mbox{m}\:{\mbox{s}^{-1}}$, corresponding to a planet with a minimum mass $m \sin i = 4.00^{+0.53}_{-0.55}\, M_{\oplus }$. We find no evidence of significant signals at the detected period in spectroscopic stellar activity indicators or MEarth photometry. The planet, Ross 508 b, has a semi-major axis of $0.05366^{+0.00056}_{-0.00049}\:$au. This gives an orbit-averaged insolation of ≈1.4 times the Earth’s value, placing Ross 508 b near the inner edge of its star’s habitable zone. We have explored the possibility that the planet has a high eccentricity and its host is accompanied by an additional unconfirmed companion on a wide orbit. Our discovery demonstrates that the near-infrared RV search can play a crucial role in finding a low-mass planet around cool M dwarfs like Ross 508.

Detailed chemical analyses of M dwarfs are scarce but necessary to constrain the formation environment and internal structure of planets being found around them. We present elemental abundances of 13 M dwarfs (2900 < T eff < 3500 K) observed in the Subaru/IRD planet search project. They are mid- to late-M dwarfs whose abundance of individual elements has not been well studied. We use the high-resolution (∼70,000) near-infrared (970–1750 nm) spectra to measure the abundances of Na, Mg, Si, K, Ca, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, and Sr by the line-by-line analysis based on model atmospheres, with typical errors ranging from 0.2 dex for [Fe/H] to 0.3–0.4 dex for other [X/H]. We measure radial velocities from the spectra and combine them with Gaia astrometry to calculate the Galactocentric space velocities UVW. The resulting [Fe/H] values agree with previous estimates based on medium-resolution K-band spectroscopy, showing a wide distribution of metallicity (−0.6 < [Fe/H] < +0.4). The abundance ratios of individual elements [X/Fe] are generally aligned with the solar values in all targets. While the [X/Fe] distributions are comparable to those of nearby FGK stars, most of which belong to the thin-disk population, the most metal-poor object, GJ 699, could be a thick-disk star. The UVW velocities also support this. The results raise the prospect that near-infrared spectra of M dwarfs obtained in the planet search projects can be used to grasp the trend of elemental abundances and the Galactic stellar population of nearby M dwarfs.

We report on the discovery of an Earth-sized transiting planet (R p = 1.015 ± 0.051 R ⊕) in a P = 4.02 day orbit around K2-415 (EPIC 211414619), an M5V star at 22 pc. The planet candidate was first identified by analyzing the light-curve data obtained by the K2 mission, and it is here shown to exist in the most recent data from TESS. Combining the light curves with the data secured by our follow-up observations, including high-resolution imaging and near-infrared spectroscopy with IRD, we rule out false-positive scenarios, finding a low false-positive probability of 2 × 10−4. Based on IRD’s radial velocities of K2-415, which were sparsely taken over three years, we obtain a planet mass of 3.0 ± 2.7 M ⊕ (M p < 7.5 M ⊕ at 95% confidence) for K2-415b. Being one of the lowest-mass stars (≈0.16 M ⊙) known to host an Earth-sized transiting planet, K2-415 will be an interesting target for further follow-up observations, including additional radial velocity monitoring and transit spectroscopy.