{"id":196881,"date":"2024-10-01T17:24:37","date_gmt":"2024-10-01T22:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/discovery-of-barnard-b-a-new-exoplanet-orbiting-our-nearest-stellar-neighbor"},"modified":"2024-10-01T17:24:37","modified_gmt":"2024-10-01T22:24:37","slug":"discovery-of-barnard-b-a-new-exoplanet-orbiting-our-nearest-stellar-neighbor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/discovery-of-barnard-b-a-new-exoplanet-orbiting-our-nearest-stellar-neighbor","title":{"rendered":"Discovery of Barnard b: A New Exoplanet Orbiting Our Nearest Stellar Neighbor"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cWe now need to continue observing this star to confirm the other candidate signals,\u201d said Dr. Alejandro Su\u00e1rez Mascare\u00f1o. \u201cBut the discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets.\u201d<\/p>\n

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How close are Earth-sized exoplanets to Earth? This is what a recent study<\/a> published in Astronomy & Astrophysics<\/em> hopes to address as a large international team of researchers have announced the discovery of Barnard b, which orbits Barnard\u2019s star<\/a> approximately 6 light-years from Earth. This discovery is profound because Barnard\u2019s star is the closest single star to Earth but also because Barnard b is estimated to be approximately just over one-third the mass of the Earth, or approximately three times the mass of the planet Mars.<\/p>\n

Barnard\u2019s star is approximately 16 percent the mass of our Sun with approximately 19 percent of its diameter. While the size of Barnard b poses the possibility that it might be Earth-like, its 3.15-day orbit puts it well inside its star\u2019s habitable zone (HZ).<\/p>\n

\u201cBarnard 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,\u201d said Dr. Jonay Gonz\u00e1lez Hern\u00e1ndez<\/a>, who is a researcher at the Instituto de Astrof\u00edsica de Canarias in Spain, and lead author of the study. \u201cEven if the star is about 2,500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot there to maintain liquid water on the surface.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe now need to continue observing this star to confirm the other candidate signals,\u201d said Dr. Alejandro Su\u00e1rez Mascare\u00f1o. \u201cBut the discovery of this planet, along with other previous discoveries such as Proxima b and d, shows that our cosmic backyard is full of low-mass planets.\u201d How close are Earth-sized exoplanets to Earth? This is [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":706,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}