The newly discovered exoplanet is closer to Earth than a few other planets

There are only six light years between the new exoplanet and Earth. The research team can already answer a particularly important question.

Tenerife – The closest star to Earth after the Sun – Proxima Centauri – orbits several exoplanets. The star and exoplanet are located 4.24 light-years from Earth, which is a stone's throw from astronomical dimensions. Now a research team has discovered another exoplanet near Earth. There are only six light years between Earth and the exoplanet orbiting Barnard's Star.

Researchers have been searching for exoplanets around Barnard's Star for a long time

The red dwarf star in the constellation Ophiuchus is the closest known star to Earth – after the Alpha Centauri star system, which also includes Proxima Centauri – and has long been studied in search of exoplanets. “Even though it took a long time, we were always confident that we would find something,” says Junay Gonzalez Hernandez (Institute of Astrophysics of Canaria), who is working with a team on a study of the new exoplanet. In the specialized magazine Astronomy and astrophysics published He has.

The exoplanet orbits Barnard's Star and is only six light-years away from Earth

Gonzalez-Hernandez's team was actually looking for signals from potential exoplanets within Barnard's star's habitable zone — that is, in the region where liquid water could exist on the surface. But on Barnard B, as the newly discovered exoplanet is now called, there is no chance of liquid water: the little planet is 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun. Therefore, one revolution around the star takes only 3.15 Earth days.

The temperature at the surface is about 125 degrees Celsius, which is very hot for liquid water. “Even if the star is about 2,500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot there to support the presence of liquid water on the surface,” Gonzalez Hernandez asserts in one of the articles. He notices.

“A cosmic backyard full of low-mass planets.”

The high-resolution ESPRESSO instrument from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) was used to discover the exoplanet. It can measure the wobble of a star orbiting one or more planets and attracted by its gravity. Additional instruments were able to confirm the newly discovered exoplanet. “Barnard B is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few planets with a mass less than that of Earth,” explains Gonzalez-Hernandez. The mass of the exoplanet is about half that of Venus.

The existence of an exoplanet around Barnard's Star was reported as early as 2018, but this has not yet been confirmed. The new data also does not support the existence of the celestial body that was reported in 2018. To do this, the research team tracked evidence of three other exoplanet candidates around Barnard's Star, but this has not yet been confirmed.

“We now have to continue monitoring this star in order to verify the signals of other candidates,” stresses study author Alejandro Suarez Mascareno. “But the discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets.” (unpaid bill)