More details: Found hereHeadlines:
Astronomers have identified 4 exoplanets orbiting the nearest single star to Earth, an effort that had been ongoing for 50 years and produced many false positives.
These rather small planets are a stone's throw from Earth in galactic terms, but were too small for previous instruments to detect.
Barnard's Star is a low-mass red dwarf star just 6 light-years from Earth discovered in 1916, and astronomers have long wondered if there could be planets orbiting it just like there are in our solar system.
So instead, astronomers can use the radial velocity method which looks for ⁘wobbles⁘ in the star's position caused by the gravity of an orbiting exoplanet gently tugging at it during close approaches.
"It's a really exciting find—Barnard's Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it," said lead study author Ritvik Basant, doctoral student of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, in a statement cited by CNN . "It's signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations."
The worlds are referred to as sub-Earths, meaning they have a much lower mass than Earth, in this case between 19% and 34% of our planet's total size. They are likely uninhabited rocks due to their positioning around their star.
"When compared to our solar system, each of the four planets are inside the distance of Mercury's orbit," Basant said.
That means on the closest one, it takes just 3 days to complete a year, and even the farthest one takes 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment