'Sub-Earth' exoplanet discovered around the closest solo star to us
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‘Sub-Earth’ exoplanet discovered around the closest solo star to us

Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting the closest solo star to the solar system, known as Barnard’s star. The newly discovered exoplanet has around half the mass of Venus, which classifies it as a “sub-Earth.” 

The exoplanet, designated Barnard b, takes just over three Earth days to orbit its red dwarf parent star, which is located around six light-years away. That’s because Barnard b is just around 1.8 million miles from Barnard’s star. Although this may sound like an immense distance, it is only 5% of the distance between the sun and its closest planet, Mercury.

“Barnard b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few known with a mass less than that of Earth. But the planet is too close to the host star, closer than the habitable zone,” team leader Jonay González Hernández, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, said in a statement. “Even if the star is about 2,500 degrees cooler than our sun, it is too hot to maintain liquid water on the surface.”

A diagram showing the closest stars to the solar system. Though the Centauri stars are closer, Barnard’s star is the closest solo star to the sun. (Image credit: IEEC/Science-Wave – Guillem Ramisa)

González Hernández and colleagues discovered Barnard b using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), an array of four telescopes located on the mountain Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.

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