Discovery of a new “mini-Earth” near the solar system

Astronomers have discovered a small planet orbiting the closest single star to the solar system, known as Barnard’s Star. The newly discovered exoplanet has about half the mass of Venus and takes just over three Earth days to orbit its red dwarf star.

The exoplanet, called Barnard b, is located just 2.9 million kilometers from Barnard’s star, which may seem like a long distance, but it is only 5% of the distance between the Sun and Mercury.

Team leader Junay Gonzalez Hernandez of the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands in Spain said in a statement statement Barnard b is one of the “lowest-mass known” exoplanets and one of the few “less-than-Earth-mass” planets.

Is the exoplanet habitable?

According to the expert, the planet is very close to the host star, “closer to the habitable zone”: “Although the star is about 2,500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot to maintain liquid water on the surface.”

How was the new exoplanet discovered?

• Hernandez and his colleagues discovered Barnard B using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), an array of four telescopes located on Cerro Paranal mountain in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile;
• The exoplanet was detected due to a slight “wobble” that occurred in the movement of its red dwarf star;
• The discovery was made possible thanks to a VLT instrument called the “Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscope Observations” or ESPRESSO;
• Barnard’s star’s proximity to our planet has made it a prime target in the search for rocky, Earth-like planets.
• Information is from space.

Hernandez and his team also scanned the area around Barnard B for possible signs of exoplanets. The team was particularly interested in rocky worlds in the habitable zone around the nearby star.

This region is characterized by being the region surrounding the star, which is neither too hot nor too cold to allow liquid water to exist without boiling or freezing.

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The same team has also found signs of three other potential exoplanets around Barnard’s Star, which they intend to confirm using ESPRESSO.

The research was published on Tuesday (first) in the journal Astronomy and astrophysics.