In the quiet town of La Serena, Chile, beneath the dry skies of the Atacama Desert, astronomer Dr. Elisa Romero stared into the glowing data from her observatory’s newest radio telescope. It was 2032, and her team had been tracking exoplanets in nearby systems. Her current obsession was a small, yellow G-type star 19.8 light-years away—HD 20794.This star, much like our own Sun but slightly older and dimmer, had three confirmed planets. One of them, labeled HD 20794 D, was a "super-Earth"—larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune. At roughly 4.8 Earth masses, it orbited in what was thought to be