Barnard b is only six light years away (Picture: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting the closest solo star to Earth.
The solo star, which is known as Barnard’s star, is a red dwarf which is around 80% smaller than our sun and sits around six light years away from our solar system.
The newly discovered planet, dubbed Barnard b, has half the mass of Venus, and a year on it lasts slightly more than three Earth days.
The astronomers published their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), the researchers also suggest that there could be three more exoplanets that orbit the star.
However, the researchers are sure there is no life on Barnard b as it sits twenty times closer to Barnard’s star than Mercury is to the Sun, and therefore has a surface temperature of a blisteringly hot 125°C.
Despite Barnard’s star being the single closest solo star to us, the exoplanet is not the closest one to Earth. The closest stellar system to Earth is the three star group of Alpha Centauri, which hosts the planet Proxima Centauri b and is around four light years away.
Barnard’s star is the second closest star system to the Sun, and the nearest single star to us (Picture: IEEC/Science-Wave – Guillem Ramisa)
Researchers were excited to find this planet, as no planet orbiting Barnard’s star has been discovered until now – and due to its proximity to Earth, it is a primary target in the search for Earth-like exoplanets.
The team are particularly interested in rocky worlds in the habitable zone around this close star.
This region, also known as the ‘Goldilocks zone’, is special because it is the area around a star that is neither too hot nor too cold for water to exist on an orbiting planet without boiling away or freezing. And if there is liquid water, among other things, there may be life.
Barnard b was discovered as a result of observations made over five years using the VLT, which is located in Chile.
Using a highly precise instrument called ESPRESSO (the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations), the team measured the wobble of a star which is caused by the gravitational pull of one more orbiting planets to find Barnard b.
Then, when the researchers thought they had found something, they confirmed their findings by using data from the exoplanet-hunting High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS).
What is an exoplanet and how are they found?
The eight planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. Planets that orbit around other stars are called exoplanets
These planets are very hard to see directly with telescopes. They are hidden by the bright glare of the stars they orbit
Astronomers search for exoplanets by looking for ‘wobbly stars’, which is a star that has planets which don’t orbit perfectly around its center. From far away, this off-center orbit makes the star look like it’s wobbling
Another method, used to look for smaller Earth-sized planets, is the transit …read more
Source:: Metro
