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USA, Oct 2. - Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), of the European Southern Observatory, a team of astronomers discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard, the closest star to our Sun, NASA reported today.
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States (NASA), the discovery is the result of observations made over the last 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 Alpha Centauri group of three stars, and the closest single star to us.
Despite a promising detection in 2018, no planets have 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 Earth.
“But it is too close to the host star, closer than the habitable zone. Even if the star is about 2,500 degrees colder than our Sun, it is too hot to maintain liquid water on the planet's surface," explained Jonay González, 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, along with other previous findings such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets," the expert stressed. (Text and Photo: Cubasí)
