{"id":198162,"date":"2024-10-23T10:22:23","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T15:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/scientists-discover-planet-orbiting-closest-single-star-to-our-sun"},"modified":"2024-10-23T10:22:23","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T15:22:23","slug":"scientists-discover-planet-orbiting-closest-single-star-to-our-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/scientists-discover-planet-orbiting-closest-single-star-to-our-sun","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Discover Planet Orbiting Closest Single Star to our Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-discover-planet-orbiting-closest-single-star-to-our-sun.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT), astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard\u2019s star, the closest single star to our sun. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus, a year lasts just over three Earth days. The team\u2019s observations also hint at the existence of three more exoplanet candidates, in various orbits around the star.<\/p>\n<p>Located just six light-years away, Barnard\u2019s star is the second-closest stellar system\u2014after Alpha Centauri\u2019s three-star group\u2014and the closest individual star to us. Owing to its proximity, it is a primary target in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. Despite a promising detection back in 2018, no planet orbiting Barnard\u2019s star had been confirmed until now.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery of this new exoplanet\u2014announced in a paper published today in the journal Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics\u2014is the result of observations made over the last five years with ESO\u2019s VLT, located at Paranal Observatory in Chile. \u201cEven if it took a long time, we were always confident that we could find something,\u201d says Jonay Gonz\u00e1lez Hern\u00e1ndez, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrof\u00edsica de Canarias in Spain, and lead author of the paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT), astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard\u2019s star, the closest single star to our sun. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus, a year lasts just over three Earth days. The team\u2019s observations also hint at the existence [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198162","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\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}