Excited scientists have found three more planets around Barnard’s Star, the second-nearest star system to Earth, just months after discovering the first — after more than a century of searching.
"We just couldn’t wait to get this secret out," said professor Jacob Bean at the University of Chicago, whose team created and installed a new small planet-hunting instrument called MAROON-X on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. "We found something that humanity will hopefully know forever. That sense of discovery is incredible.”
Barnard’s Star: Four Planets Revealed
According to data from Gemini North, the four planets around Barnard’s Star are not Earth-like. Just 20-30% of the mass of Earth, the planets orbit their star in a few days, so are likely too hot to support life.
“It’s a really exciting find — Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” said Ritvik Basant, Ph.D student at the University of Chicago and first author of a paper published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations,” he added, referring to the use of MAROON-X. The planets were found using data from 112 nights over three years.
Barnard’s Star: Discovery Of First Planet
The news comes just months after another group of scientists using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile announced that they had found a planet around the star, calling it Barnard’s b. Around 20 times closer than Mercury is to the sun, Barnard b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few known with a mass less than that of Earth. It took the astronomers five years to find it after a hint of it in 2018.
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Barnard’s Star: ‘Great White Whale’
Largely because it’s so close to the solar system, astronomers have been studying Barnard’s Star since its discovery in 1916 in the hope of finding planets orbiting it. False alarms about possible planets orbiting it have led it to be called a “great white whale” for planet hunters.
Unlike previous discoveries of planets around Barnard’s Star that proved difficult to confirm, the scientists were able to independently confirm in two different studies by the different instruments — one called ESPRESSO on the Very Large Telescope, as well as MAROON-X. “We observed at different times of night on different days," said Basant. "They’re in Chile, we're in Hawaii. Our teams didn’t coordinate with each other at all. That gives us a lot of assurance that these aren’t phantoms in the data.”
Barnard's Star is a small red dwarf star in the constellation of Ophiuchus.Stellarium
Why Barnard’s Star Is So Special
Stars don't move. Or, at least, that's the way it seems. In one human lifetime, stars appear to move mere fractions of an arcsecond — a unit of measurement for angles and distances in the night sky. Nearby stars can appear to move a few arcminutes.
Only one star, however, moves 10 arcminutes per decade — about the width of the moon in a human lifetime. Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf star in the constellation of Ophiuchus, is just six light-years from the solar system. Only the three-star Alpha Centauri system, which is 4.1 light-years distant, is closer, making Barnard’s Star the closest single star to the solar system. In 2016, astronomers found a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, one of the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system.
Barnard’s star is a red dwarf star, a low-mass, cool star that comprises about 70% of all the stars in the Milky Way. It's too dim to be visible to the naked eye.
Since most rocky planets found so far are much larger than Earth, the discovery of smaller planets around Barnard's Star is, hope the scientists, a landmark moment.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.