Researchers find exoplanets in our cosmic neighborhood
Barnard's Star is our cosmic neighbor. Researchers have found several planets in its orbit.
Artistic representation of the Barnard's Star system
(Image: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor/J. Pollard)
Barnard's star is the closest single star to our solar system. A few months ago, an exoplanet was discovered in its orbit. However, it does not orbit the star alone, as researchers have discovered.
A team led by astronomer Ritvik Basant from the University of Chicago has found three more exoplanets. All four are presumably rocky planets like Earth, the team writes in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, but significantly smaller.
“This is a really exciting find,” said Basant. “Barnard's Star is our cosmic neighbor, but we still know very little about it.”
The planets are smaller than Earth
The four exoplanets are significantly smaller than the Earth — their mass is between 20 and 30 percent of the Earth's mass. It is very unlikely that there is life on them: they are far too close to the star to be in the so-called habitable zone.
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The innermost planet orbits Barnard's star in just 2.3 days, the outermost in 6.7 days. The researchers estimate the surface temperatures to be between 66 and 210 degrees Celsius.
Basant's team, which also includes a researcher from Heidelberg University, found the exoplanets using the 8-meter Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in the US state of Hawaii. The measuring instrument used was the MAROON-X spectrograph, which was specially designed for the search for red dwarf planets.
Barnard's star is a so-called red dwarf — these stars are faint and cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It is located in the constellation of the Serpent Bearer and is around six light years away from us. Only the triple system of Alpha-Centauri and Proxima-Centauri is even closer.
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The star is named after its discoverer: the US astronomer Emerson E. Barnard found it in 1916. As it is close to Earth, researchers have been intensively searching for possible exoplanets orbiting it for some time. However, they only found what they were looking for last year. The discovery of a super-Earth in 2018 later proved to be false.
(wpl)
