Four small rocky planets have been confirmed in orbit the star of Barnard, which is located in the compilling ofiuch. The concept of this artist shows the system from the point of view of one of his planets. Credit: Gemini Observatory/Noirlab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld
Starting from 2025, astronomers have identified at least 14 stars within 10 light years from the sun. After the Alpha Centauri system, the neighbor is the closest is Barnard’s star, a solo red dwarf nano about 6 years light away. And thanks to the new observations, we now know that Barnard’s star is orbit of four small rocky exoplanets.
But it was an accidental road. Since its discovery in 1916 of the American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard, Barnard’s star saw several orbit orbit affirmations, dating back to the 1960s. Much more recently, in 2018 a super-terme has been planned, but this discovery was refuted in 2021.
The research published in August 2024 has finally confirmed the presence of a Barnard star of a planet, nicknamed the Star B or Barnard B of Barnard in short.
And now, three other planets have been confirmed in an article published on 11 March in The letters of Astrophysics magazinebringing the count now to four planets.
Looking at the oscillations
The planets were all found using the radial speed or the “oscillation” method, which uses movements in the wavelength of the light by a star caused by the slight tespeter AE by a planet in orbit. Small planets also induce a slight oscillation in the sun as the two orbit a shared center of gravity. Using tools such as the espresso on the very large telescope in Chile (which identified Barnard B) and Maroon-X on the North Gemini telescope in Hawaii (which has found the three recent worlds), the astronomers can detect the Doppler change in the light emitted by the star while leaving towards us and so on. The signature of this light also allows them to determine the details on the planets in question, including their size.
The planets were all found using the radial speed method, which seeks changes in the light of a star caused by the shot of a planet orbit. The new research was conducted by a team from the University of Chicago who observed the Star of Barnard 112 times using Maroon-X between 2021 and 2023. They were following potential signals in the data collected by a separate team, which identified the Star B of Barnard that used the espresso in 2024 and noticed three other possible planets. This prompted the Uchicago team to examine their data, which helped them confirm the Star B of Barnard and led to the discovery of the star C, D and E.
The Star System of Barnard
The planet previously discovered, Barnard B, is probably a rocky planet with about 30 percent of terrestrial mass and an orbital period (or “year”) equal to about 3.15 days of earth.
Each of the planets just found is a smaller sub -land, with no more than a third of the land mass, and travels around its host star in less than seven days.
Although Barnard’s star is a small small red dwarf, just a little larger than Jupiter and therefore much less bright than our sun, the four planets orbit so closely that they are inside the internal border of the habitable area of their star. The habitable area is the region around a star where temperatures allow a planet to accommodate liquid water on its surface. So, these planets are all orbits so closely that the temperatures are too high to make the liquid surface waters remain.
The four planets are also at the mercy of the bad behavior of their star. The red dwarfs are more dimmer but much more active than the larger stars like the sun. Barnard’s star is estimated at least 10 billion years and is less active than other red dwarfs, but still suffers from occasional steel activities. This includes Razzi in 1998 and 2019 that scientists deduced that the planets orbit they would have problems there to retain their atmospheres on geological coves.
Although the prospects of life seem dark here, this discovery still shows that there are probably many more worlds to find also in our local neighborhood. Since the first Exoplanet was confirmed in 1995, we certainly found almost 6,000 more. This number will certainly continue to rise as a meteor, with incredible implications for our place in the universe.
Note of the editor: A previous version of this story erroneously stated that the Uchicago team discounted possible relevance of Barnard’s Star C, D and and by Maroon-X while the tool was still calibrated.
