For a century, astronomers have studied the Barnard star in the hope of finding the planets around … [+]
Excited scientists have found three other planets around Barnard star, the second closest system of stars on Earth, just months after discovering the first-after more than a century of research.
“We just couldn’t wait to bring this secret,” Professor Jacob Bean said at the University of Agoikagos, whose team created and installed a new small planet’s hunting instrument called Maroon-X telescope Gemini in Hawaii. “We found something that humanity will hopefully know forever. This feeling of discovery is extraordinary.”
Barnard star: discovered four planets
According to Gemini North data, the four planets around Barnard star are not similar to Earth. Only 20-30% of the Earth mass, the planets orbiting their star within days, so they are likely to be too hot to support life.
“It’s a really exciting finding – Barnard star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” said Ritvik Basant, a pH.D student at the University of Agoikagos and the first author of a published work Tuesday at The letters of the astrophysical newspaper. “It is signaling a progress with the accuracy 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 star: Discovering the first planet
The news comes just months after another group of scientists using the very large telescope of the Southern European Observatory in Chile announced that they had found a planet about the star, calling it Barnard’s B. About 20 times closer than Mercury is in the sun, Barnard B is one of the lowest exoplanets known and one of the few known to a less than that of Earth. It took astronomers five years to find him after his allusion in 2018.
Barnard star: ‘big white whale’
Mostly because it is so close to the solar system, astronomers have studied the Barnard star since its discovery in 1916 in the hope of finding planets rotating it. Fake alarms about the potential planets that rotate it have made it called A “big white whale” for the planet hunters.
Unlike previous discoveries of the planets about the Barnard star that proved difficult to confirm, scientists were able to confirm independently in two different studies from different instruments-one called Espresso in the very large telescope as well as Maroon-X. “We have noticed at different nights of the night on different days,” Basant said. “They are in Chile, we are in Hawaii. Our teams did not coordinate with each other at all. This gives us a lot of assurance that these are not ghosts in the data.”
Barnard star is a small red dwarf star in the constellation of ophiuchus.
Why the Barnard star is so special
The stars do not move. Or, at least, this is the way it seems. In a human life, the stars seem to simply move fractions of a bow – a unit of measurement for angles and distances in the night sky. Near stars can appear to move some arcminutes.
Only one star, however, moves 10 arcminutes in decade – for the width of the moon in a human life. The Barnard star, a red dwarf star in the constellation of Ophiuchus, is only six years of light from the solar system. Only the three-star system Alpha Centauri, which is 4.1 light years away, is closer, making Barnard star closest to the solar system. In 2016, astronomers found a planet rotating Proxima Centauri, one of the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system.
The Barnard star is a red dwarf star, a light and delightful star that comprises about 70% of all the stars on the Milky Way. It is too pale to be visible to the naked eye.
Since most of the rock planets found so far are much larger than Earth, the discovery of the smallest planets about Barnard star is, I hope scientists, a milestone.
Wishing you to cleanse the sky and wide eyes.