Scientists say they have finally discovered a world orbiting Barnard’s star, one of the closest stars the sun.
This rocky planetdiscovered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, it is smaller than Earth, and orbits its small, cool star every three days. Barnard’s star is six light-years away from us, in the constellation Ophiuchus. The only close stars are the three that make up the Alpha Centauri system.
Anyone has it admit it? yes, an exoplanet hunters think before they find the world around this particular star – famous sci-fi setting – and their finders are visible well darn sure of their data, too.
But this is the real deal, says a new team of researchers. Be honest.
“The discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, show that our cosmic yard is full of low-mass planets,” said Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, co-author of the paper. published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics today.
Scientists have yet to find a rocky exoplanet with an atmosphere. But now they have a plan.
A confirmed exoplanet orbits Barnard’s star every three days.
Credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser illustration
Despite its proximity to our solar system, Barnard’s star is too faint to be seen by the naked eye. A simple eight-inch telescope should be able to see it in depth spacehowever.
This special star, which has been the target of exoplanet searches for over a century, has a long history of false planet discoveries. Six years ago, an international team of researchers thought they had discovered a planet three times the size of Earth, just outside the so-called habitable zone, in the Barnard star system. The authors of that paper, published in the journal The environmenthe described the earth as ice and revolved around it red elf host star every 233 days.
Mashable Light Speed
That possible discovery, using i radial velocity methodit relies on 771 sightings over twenty years. Although at the time it was considered unconfirmed, the lead scientist had said in a statement that he was “99% sure that the planet exists,” although the team will continue to observe the star to rule out other “possible,” but “unlikely” explanations.
The Tweet may have been deleted
The radial velocity method looks for subtle changes in the frequency of the star’s light as seen from Earth. The gravitational pull of an orbiting planet is thought to cause a slight fluctuation in the light ratio. But sometimes astronomers can be fooled: What may appear to be a sign of a planet may actually be tiny spots on the star’s surface, causing false detections.
Since the 2018 Super-Earth candidate was proposed, other follow-up astronomical studies have formally disproved its existence, including this latest one. In 2021, a team led by astrologer Jack Rubin made nearly 120 new ideas with the instrument on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas and found that the errant signal was associated with the star’s rotation period of 145 days.
A clue that there was a misinterpretation came from the fact that the strongest signal coincided with a period when astronomical activity was strongest. In 2022, another party they found that the planetary signal was impossible.
But it wasn’t the first time the star had tricked astronomers into thinking it had planets. Astronomer Peter van de Kamp thought he had discovered two giant planets around Barnard’s star, the first one back in the 1960s. Some astronomers say he may have died believing he was the first to discover exoplanets. His own findings they were decommissioned in later years.
Unlike previous bloopers, it’s a signal of a newly discovered planet – one that weighs half the mass of Earth Venus – the first exoplanet confirmed in the Barnard star system by at least two other telescopes. Other confirmatory observations came from the Roque de los Muchachos and Calar Alto observatories in Spain and the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Astronomers estimate that the planet is about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury in the sun, the surface temperature is about 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
Barnard’s star is only six light-years away from the sun.
Credit: IEEC / Science-Wave – Guillem Ramisa infographic
The bad news: Even if the star were about 2,500 degrees cooler than the sun, the planet would still be too hot for liquid water to exist on its surface, and would be uninhabitable, said lead author Jonay González Hernández. But the good news is that the team found three other planets near the star – and maybe one of those, if confirmed, could be Earth-like.
The previously suspected exoplanets were called “Barnard b” until they were ruled out in a complex and complicated process to find new worlds billions of miles away.
So, in the famous words of Speaking the Truth game show, is the real barnard b please stand up?