Barnard’s star has at least one planet orbiting it after all

A red dwarf star often also is legendary as Barnard’s star, which lies a mere six light-years from our solar system, has no not up to one — and most likely a handful — of small rocky planets orbiting it, a fresh study suggests.

Barnard’s star, which is ready one-sixth the mass of our sun, is the closest individual star to our solar system. Handiest the three stars within the Alpha Centauri system are closer. Caused by its proximity to Earth, Barnard’s star has long been a target of astronomers seeking out exoplanets (SN: 12/1/seventy three, SN: 12/7/23).

Now, after a few false starts over the decades, researchers may at last have hit pay dirt. Jonay González Hernández, an astrophysicist on the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, and his team scrutinized more than 150 observations made by a telescope in South The USA of a over the course of 4 years. Specifically, they looked for tiny wobbles which is able to betray the presence of planets gravitationally yanking the star back and forth as they orbited.

The strongest wobble takes place every three.15 days, the team reports online October 1 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. It probably is caused by the near-circular orbit of a small rocky planet about thrice the mass of Mars, says González Hernández.

The researchers have done an top quality job of except for for other imaginable sources of the wobble, reminiscent of rotation of the star or movement of the telescope at some point of observations, says astronomer Jennifer Burt. Those efforts, plus the high precision of the instruments used to compile the team’s data, “will convince scientists that this discovery is real,” notes Burt, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. That, in turn, should inspire other teams to revisit each of the past observations that they’ve made of Barnard’s star.

Indeed, the new study implies that there are more discoveries to be made. González Hernández and his colleagues have noted smaller oscillations that are superimposed on the larger wobble. Though they are yet to be confirmed, they likely represent the presence of three smaller orbs circling the star at periods of 2.34 days, four.12 days and 6.seventy four days. All four of these purported planets are too just about Barnard’s star to improve life as we understand it, the researchers suggest