Entire planetary system of four tiny exoplanets found orbiting the nearest single star to the sun
After decades of searching, astronomers have uncovered some of the strongest evidence yet of exoplanets orbiting Barnard's Star, the nearest single star system to Earth. The four planets are classified as sub-Earths because each one is about 19% to 34% the mass of Earth, according to new research.
'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. 'It's signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations.'
Barnard's Star, discovered by American astronomer E.E. Barnard in 1916, is a low-mass red dwarf, one of the most common types of stars. Over the past decade, astronomers have found that many of these stars have multiple rocky planets orbiting them.
Enter MAROON-X, an instrument mounted on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii that's designed to search for exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs. The instrument seeks out planets by detecting the subtle wobble of stars as the gravity of orbiting planets tug on their stellar hosts, known as the radial velocity technique.
Using MAROON-X, the study team spotted the least massive exoplanet ever found, and it hopes the find will lead to the discovery of more sub-Earth exoplanets across the cosmos.
Astronomers believe smaller exoplanets may be more varied in composition than the larger exoplanets detected so far. Finding more minuscule worlds with the latest, highly sensitive instruments could open up a new way of understanding how planets form — and which ones could be habitable for life.
A study detailing the findings was published March 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Four tiny worlds
The planets are so small that they are more analogous to Mars, according to Basant.
'When compared to our solar system, each of the four planets are inside the distance of Mercury's orbit,' Basant said.
The planets closely orbit Barnard's Star, zipping around their stellar host in a matter of days, compared with the year it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the sun. The outermost planet takes less than seven days to complete one orbit, while the innermost planet has an orbital period of less than three days, Basant said.
Proximity at a price
The planets are so close to the star that their surfaces are likely too hot to be habitable.That means the foursome are also not within the habitable zone of the star, or just the right distance from the star where liquid water can stably exist on the surface of the planet.
'When Barnard's star was young and active … the star blasted these small planets with X-UV radiation, frequent flares, and dense winds,' said Edward Guinan, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, in an email. 'Because of this, these sub-Earth size planets probably don't have atmospheres, water, and life.'
Guinan was not involved in the new study but has previously searched for planets around Barnard's Star.
Planets of this size are largely unexplored beyond our solar system, making it a significant step forward as astronomers search for Earth-mass planets around sun-like stars, Basant said.
'A lot of what we do can be incremental, and it's sometimes hard to see the bigger picture,' said study coauthor Jacob Bean, a professor in the University of Chicago's department of astronomy and astrophysics. 'But we found something that humanity will hopefully know forever. That sense of discovery is incredible.'
The search for nearby planets
While the Proxima Centauri system is the closest to our solar system at a distance of 4.25 light-years away, it comprises three stars circling one another, making Barnard's Star the nearest single star system.
Now, astronomers know that planets orbit the two closest star systems to our solar system.
Barnard's Star has served as a kind of white whale for astronomers over the decades as they have tried to find evidence of planets orbiting it, only to be disproven as false positives later, 'likely due to the limited sensitivity of earlier instruments,' Basant said.
Many exoplanets have been discovered as they transit, or pass in front of, their host star, creating an observable dip in starlight suggesting the presence of a planet.
But the elusive planets orbiting Barnard's Star do not transit, meaning they don't pass in front of their star from the perspective of telescopes on Earth and can't be detected with powerful space observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope.
The research team, led by Bean, captured data from Barnard's Star over the course of 112 nights spanning a period of three years. The data showed evidence for three planets orbiting Barnard's Star, two of which had been previously suggested as potential planets.
The researchers then combined their findings with data captured using the ESPRESSO instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile by a different team that authored an October 2024 study. The combined dataset confirmed the existence of a fourth exoplanet.
'We observed at different times of night on different days. They're in Chile; we're in Hawaii. Our teams didn't coordinate with each other at all,' Basant said. 'That gives us a lot of assurance that these aren't phantoms in the data. It's thrilling to witness the precision of next-generation spectrographs like MAROON-X and ESPRESSO. Their ability to detect sub-Earth mass planets for the first time feels like unlocking a new level in a game, filled with unknown possibilities.'
MAROON-X, which began as a temporary 'visitor' instrument, is now being converted to a permanent one after its detections.
'I am very happy to see that new MAROON-X data provide an independent confirmation of the planet b and candidates c and d, and together with the ESPRESSO data, the analysis makes the detection significantly more robust,' said Jonay González Hernández, lead author of the October 2024 paper and a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain. He was not involved in the new study.
Guinan said the planets described within the study 'look like a firm discovery.'
'Finally, real planets have been discovered around Barnard's Star after several false alarms over the past (50 years),' Guinan said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
2 hours ago
- CBS News
Tiny fragment of asteroid giving Field Museum scientists a glimpse 4.6 billion years into the past
The Field Museum is the new temporary home to a tiny piece of pristine asteroid. The fragment of the asteroid Bennu, on loan from NASA, won't be on display for visitors, but will give scientists the chance to study an asteroid sample uncontaminated by Earth's atmosphere. A tiny, black fragment might not seem exciting, until a scientist explains it's a specimen from space. "It's an honor of a lifetime to be able to study this sample," said Field Museum curator Dr. Philipp Heck. How did Heck feel when the little rock first arrived at the museum and he held the vial containing the sample? "It was amazing. I was looking forward to that moment for a long time," he said. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission was planned decades ago. In 2016, a spacecraft launched. In 2018, it arrived at Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid as wide as the Sears Tower is tall. The mission collected pieces of the asteroid and brought them back to Earth in 2023. "This is the first U.S. mission that sends a spacecraft to the asteroid and brings a sample back to Earth," said University of Chicago graduate student Yuke Zheng, who is part of the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team. "It's a tiny, dark, black fragment that is fragile, so we want to protect it very carefully." She'll use the museum's scanning electron microscope to get an up-close look at a tiny sample of Bennu. "What struck me is how dark the sample is. I had never seen such a dark sample," Heck said. The fragment is like a time capsule, taking scientists back 4.6 billion years. "We believe Bennu contains part of the ingredients for life, and part of the ingredients of the formation of Earth," Heck said. Suddenly, a fragment at the bottom of a vial can have you pondering your place in the universe. "I've never studied a pristine sample from an asteroid," Heck said.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
New paper sheds light on experience of Black prisoners in infamous Stateville prison malaria experiments
Much has been said and written over the years about controversial malaria research conducted on inmates at Illinois' Stateville Penitentiary starting in the 1940s. But at least one part of that story has been largely ignored until now: the role of Black prisoners in that research, which helped lead to the modern practice of using genetic testing to understand how individual patients will react to certain medications, according to the authors of a newly published paper out of the University of Utah. 'We want to highlight the stories of Black prisoners that participated in this prison research in the 1950s onward and give them their due,' said Hannah Allen, a medical ethicist and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and first author of the paper, which was published as an opinion piece Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 'They haven't been properly acknowledged in the past, and their participation in these studies was really foundational in launching the field of pharmacogenetics and, later on, precision medicine,' said Allen, who recently completed her doctorate at the University of Utah. Starting in the 1940s, researchers infected inmates at the Joliet-area prison with malaria to test the effectiveness of drugs to treat the illness as part of a U.S. military-funded effort to protect American troops overseas, according to the paper. A University of Chicago doctor was the principal investigator. The inmates consented to being part of the studies and were paid for their participation. At first, the research was greeted with enthusiasm. In 1945, Life magazine ran a spread about it, featuring a photo of a Stateville inmate with cups containing malaria-carrying mosquitoes pressed against his bare chest. The first line of the story reads, 'In three U.S. penitentiaries men who have been imprisoned as enemies of society are now helping science fight another enemy of society.' But as the years passed, attitudes began to shift. Questions arose about whether inmates could truly, freely consent to participate in medical experiments or whether they felt coerced into them because of their often dire circumstances. At the Nuremberg trials, defense attorneys for Nazi doctors introduced text and images from the Life article about Stateville prison, though an Illinois physician argued at the trials that the prisoners in Stateville consented to being part of medical research whereas Nazi prisoners did not, according to the JAMA paper. In the mid-1970s, news broke about a study at Tuskegee, in which Black men with syphilis went untreated for years — news that raised awareness of ethical problems in medical research. News outlets also began publishing more stories about prison research, according to the JAMA article. The Chicago Tribune published an article in 1973, in which an inmate participating in the Stateville malaria research said: 'I've been coerced into the project — for the money. Being here has nothing to do with 'doing good for mankind' … I didn't want to keep taking money from my family.' The experiments at Stateville came to a halt in the 1970s. A number of protections and regulations are now in place when it comes to research involving prisoners. Since the 1970s, the Stateville research has often been discussed and analyzed but little attention has been paid to its Black participants, said James Tabery, a medical ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Utah who led the new research, which was funded by the federal National Institutes of Health. For a time, Black prisoners were excluded from the studies because of a myth that Black people were immune to malaria, Tabery said. Later on, once scientists had pinpointed the drug primaquine as an effective medication for malaria, they turned their attention to the question of why 5% to 10% of Black men experienced a violent reaction to the drug, according to the paper. Ultimately, the scientists were successful, finding that the adverse reaction was related to a specific genetic deficiency. 'There are people all over Chicago today that are getting tested, that clinicians are recommending they get a genetic test before they get prescribed a drug because they want to make sure that their patient isn't going to have an adverse reaction to the drug,' Tabery said. 'It's really sort of powerful and interesting that you can trace that approach to doing good clinical medicine right back to this particular moment and place and population.' But Tabery and Allen also found that the Black prisoners were not treated the same as the white prisoners who participated in research at Stateville. For one, they weren't paid as much as the white prisoners, the rationale being that the white prisoners were infected with malaria, whereas the Black prisoners were given the drug but not infected with the disease — though some of the Black prisoners got very ill after taking the medication, according to the paper. Also, researchers didn't protect the Black participants' privacy as well as they did for other participants. They published certain identifying information about the Black participants, such as initials, ages, heights and weights, whereas participants in the previous research were represented with case numbers, according to the paper. Researchers also recruited the Black prisoners' family members for the study, which they didn't do with earlier participants, according to the paper. 'You see them just doing things with the Black prisoners that they're not doing with the white prisoners,' Tabery said. Also, though scientists made an important discovery through the research on Black prisoners, the episode also highlights the difficulty that can occur in translating discoveries into real life help for patients. Though the World Health Organization now recommends genetic testing to protect people who are sensitive to antimalarials, many of the people who would benefit most from such testing still don't receive it because of financial barriers, supply chain issues and a lack of training, according to the paper. 'What we found is when you sort of shift to what was happening to the Black prisoners, these other lessons you hadn't thought of as being derivable from Stateville suddenly do become apparent,' Tabery said.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
OSU falls victim to budget cuts, putting a damper on scientific research
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The awarding of an OSU microfluidics research fund of $45 million has been called off by the Trump administration, leaving researchers fumbling for options. Microfluidics, the scientific study of the behavior of liquid on a microscopic level, is a recently established field and is hoped to aid in the medical realm as well as the manufacturing of semiconductors, a partially conductive component of many day-to-day electronic devices. The grant's cancellation has been a source of upset for researchers, but OSU is already looking ahead to future opportunities. Anti-ICE protests escalate outside Southwest Portland facility 'While we are disappointed in the notification of the EDA award cancellation for CorMic [Corvallis Microfluidics Tech Hub], we fully intend to participate in the EDA's next Notice of Funding Opportunity and remain well positioned to further national security interests as a global leader in microfluidics for semiconductor manufacturing, ' Tom Weller, Gaulke Professor and Head said. 'Oregon State University will continue to work alongside HP and other partners to further the commercialization of new microfluidics-connected technologies for semiconductor manufacturing, biotechnology, and advanced materials manufacturing.' This is not an isolated incident, with Trump having attempted to cut billions in allocated federal funding to scientific research since the beginning of his current term. White House spokesperson Kush Desai said, 'The Trump administration is spending its first few months reviewing the previous administration's projects, identifying waste, and realigning our research spending to match the American people's priorities and continue our innovative dominance.' Universities are getting hit with the full force of these budget cuts, with biomedical research being classified as 'waste.' Just in February, the National Institutes of Health proposed cutting billions of dollars to OHSU research looking at cancer and heart disease, among other afflictions. These cuts were immediately met with lawsuits from, but not limited to, the Association of American Universities and 22 state attorneys general. These lawsuits are still in progress. The Association of American Universities' lawsuit called the NIH cuts 'flagrantly unlawful' and expressed concern that 'our country will lose its status as the destination for solving the world's biggest health problems.' Scientists of the NIH itself have begun to speak out, publicly disagreeing with the institute's actions, claiming that the cuts 'undermine the NIH mission.' Cuts to scientific research are becoming a recurring source of contention as Trump's second term continues. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
