The closest star to the sun is called Barnard’s Star, and scientists have found that it has more than one planet orbiting it.
The red dwarf star, which is about six light-years from Earth, has four planets, each two to three times the mass of Mars.
There is a long history of detecting signals from Barnard’s Star, but none of them have been confirmed, said University of Chicago astronomer Rituk Basant. Because it is interesting to know what is orbiting the closest stars.
From 2021 to 2023, Rituk and his colleagues observed Barnard’s Star 112 times using the Marvin-X spectrograph on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.
“I started seeing signals in the data set, but since we were still calibrating the instrument, we ignored it,” Rituk said.
Last October, a team using the ESPRESSO spectrograph on a telescope in Chile reported evidence of a planet orbiting Barnard’s star, designated simply b, and only hints of three others.
With these hints in mind, Rituk and colleagues reexamined their data, confirming the three other planets.
