Barnard’s Star, just some 6 light-years away, has intrigued astronomers for over a century.
Does the second-closest stellar system to us host any planets?
Though this system has hoodwinked astronomers with planetary signals before, researchers say they’re confident they have detected three new planets and confirmed another. After peering at Barnard’s Star over 112 nights, scientists using a powerful telescope in Chile found compelling evidence of four particularly small exoplanets, each just some 20 to 30 percent the size of Earth. That makes them considerably smaller than Mars, which is about half Earth’s size.
“It’s a really exciting find — Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” Ritvik Basant, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Chicago who led the research, said in a statement. “It’s signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations.”
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