According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the discovery is the result of observations made over the past five years with the VLT, installed at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, which also indicate the possible existence of three other exoplanet candidates in various orbits around the star.
Located just six light years away, Barnard’s Star is the second closest star system, after the three-star cluster Alpha Centauri, and the closest individual star to us.
Despite a promising detection in 2018, no planet has been confirmed orbiting Barnard’s star until now.
Barnard b, as the newly discovered exoplanet is called, is 20 times closer to Barnard’s star than Mercury is to the Sun.
It orbits its star in 3.15 Earth days, has a surface temperature of around 125 °C and is one of the few known exoplanets with a mass less than that of Earth.
“But it is too close to the host star –closer than the habitable zone. Even if the star is about 2,500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot to sustain liquid water on the surface of the planet”, explained Jonay González, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (Spain) and lead author of the article.
Now we have to continue observing this star to confirm the other signals of possible candidates, said Alejandro Suárez, an expert at the same center and co-author of the study.
“But the discovery of this planet, together with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets,” stressed the expert.
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