2024-10-01 12:19:32
A team led by Spanish researchers has discovered a planet orbiting Barnard, the only star close to our Sun, located some six light years ago. Called Barnard b, this new exoplanet – as worlds beyond our solar system are known – is much smaller than Earth and one of the smallest known planets. Being so close to its star, its year is longer than three Earth days. Your situation is hell, but you may not be alone. The team’s observations also point to the existence of three other planetary candidates around the same star.
Barnard’s Star is the second closest star system (after the Alpha Centauri group of three stars) and the closest star to us. Because of its proximity, it is a prime target in the search for Earth-like planets. Despite its promising presence in 2018, so far no planets have confirmed its orbit.
The discovery of this new exoplanet – announced in an article published this Tuesday in the journal ‘Astronomy & Astrophysics’– is the result of observations made during the last five years with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
The team is looking for signs of possible exoplanets within Barnard’s Star’s habitable, or temperate, zone, where liquid water can exist on Earth’s surface. Red dwarfs like Barnard’s Star are often targeted by astronomers, because small rocky planets are easier to find there than around larger stars.
hell
Barnard b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few known with a mass less than Earth, but it is twenty times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun, making its orbit very , only takes 3.15 Earth days. At very close, its average surface temperature reaches 125 °C. “We think that one side of the planet faces Barnard perfectly, so it will be very hot, while the other will be very cold. These conditions make it closer to Mercury than Earth. Undoubtedly, we cannot talk about accommodation, “explained Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) and author of the study, to this newspaper. Although the star is 2,500 degrees warmer than our Sun, it is too hot there to sustain liquid water on Earth.
Finding Barnard b “has been very difficult because it is much, much smaller than Earth,” said the astrophysicist. For their observations, the team used Espresso, an advanced instrument designed to measure the gravity of a star caused by the gravitational pull of one or more of the orbiting planets. This is called the radial velocity method. « The star moves its star a little as it rotates around you. We measure the changes in the speed of the star, and if the signal repeats itself repeatedly, there is a life. In this case, there is a repetition rate of half a meter per minute, less than two kilometers per hour. In comparison, the speed of a person walking is five or six kilometers per hour,” he commented.
The results obtained from these observations are confirmed by data from other facilities also specialized in the search for exoplanets: HARPS at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, HARPS-NRoque de Los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma), and Carmenesat the Calar Alto Observatory in Almería.
A set of four?
In addition to the confirmed planet, the international team also found signs of three other exoplanet candidates orbiting the same star. These candidates, however, will need additional notices with Esprsesso to confirm. “We now need to continue observing this star to confirm other candidate signals. If we achieve it, it will be an amazing program,” said Suárez Mascareño.
For the researcher, “the discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries – such as the Proxima b and d planets, about 4 light years away – suggests that our solar system is very rich in planets and systems. “Now an find many planets similar to Earth and even smaller.” For this reason, »I am confident that soon we will find planets similar to Earth in the nearest solar system«.
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