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An exoplanet a minimum of half the mass of Venus orbits Barnard’s star, the closest single star to the Sun, as soon as every 3.15 days.
An artist’s impression of Barnard b. Image credit: ESO/ M. Kornmesser.
Barnard’s star is a 10-billion-year-old red dwarf star situated in the constellation of Ophiuchus.
At almost 6 light-years away, it is the next closest star to the Sun after the Alpha Centauri triple excellent system.
Otherwise referred to as Gliese 699 or GJ 699, the star is much smaller sized than the Sun and is categorized as an M3.5 dwarf.
Regardless of an appealing detection of a ‘super-Earth’ with a mass of 3.2 times that of Earth back in 2018, no world orbiting the star had actually been verified previously.
The discovery of the brand-new exoplanet is the outcome of observations made over 5 years with the ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory in Chile.
“Even if it took a very long time, we were constantly positive that we might discover something,” stated Dr. Jonay González Hernández, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.
Called Barnard b, the newly found world is around 20 times closer to Barnard’s star than Mercury is to the Sun.
It orbits its moms and dad star in 3.15 Earth days and has a surface area temperature level around 125 degrees Celsius (257 degrees Fahrenheit).
“Barnard b is among the lowest-mass exoplanets understood and among the couple of understood with a mass less than that of Earth,” Dr. González Hernández stated.
“But the world is too near to the host star, closer than the habitable zone.”
“Even if the star has to do with 2,500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot there to keep liquid water on the surface area.”
In addition to the verified world, the astronomers likewise discovered tips of 3 more exoplanet prospects orbiting the very same star.
These prospects, nevertheless, will need extra observations to be verified.
“We now require to continue observing this star to verify the other prospect signals,” stated Dr. Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, likewise from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and co-author of the research study.
“But the discovery of this world, in addition to other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and Proxima d, reveals that our cosmic yard has plenty of low-mass worlds.”
The discovery of Barnard b is revealed in a paper in the journal Astronomy & & Astrophysics
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J.I. González Hernández et al2024. A sub-Earth-mass world orbiting Barnard’s star. A&A 690, A79; doi: 10.1051/ 0004-6361/2024 51311
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