‘Super Earth’ found orbiting nearby star
Planet has three times Earth’s mass and is about 238 degrees below zero
A “Super Earth” – a planet much bigger and colder than our world – was discovered in orbit around a nearby star, scientists announced in a study published Wednesday.
How big? More than three times the mass of the Earth. How cold? About
238 degrees below zero. Super-Earths are planets with masses larger than the Earth but not as big as the ice giants in our solar system, such as Neptune and Uranus.
The planet and its star are nearby in cosmic terms only: At 30 trillion miles from Earth, Barnard’s Star is the closest single star to our solar system. For decades, astronomers have looked for planets around the star.
The newly discovered planet, dubbed Barnard’s Star b, is the second-closest known exoplanet to the Earth and orbits the fastest-moving star in the night sky. Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system.
“After a very careful analysis, we are
99 percent confident that the planet is there,” said a statement by the study’s lead scientist, Ignasi Ribas of Spain’s Institute of Space Sciences.
Data from a worldwide array of telescopes revealed the frozen, dimly lit world. “We used observations from seven different instruments, spanning
20 years of measurements, making this one of the largest and most extensive data sets ever used,” Ribas said.
The study was published in the British journal Nature.