Barnard's Star, 6 light years away, is a red dwarf and the closest to our own after the triple-star Centauri system. There's a planet whirling around it, somewhat smaller than Venus. Don't get your hopes up, though, as the star flares like a hippy and any world that close to it is getting baked.
Barnard b [2], as the newly discovered exoplanet is called, is twenty times closer to Barnard's star than Mercury is to the Sun. It orbits its star in 3.15 Earth days and has a surface temperature around 125 °C. "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," explains González Hernández. "Even if the star is about 2500 degrees cooler than our Sun, it is too hot there to maintain liquid water on the surface."
However, there are three more exoplanet candidates there and the ESPRESSO planet-hunting system is gathering data.
"We now need to continue observing this star to confirm the other candidate signals," says Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, a researcher also at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and co-author of the study. "But 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."
