Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2024

5 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING closest individual star to us. Owing to its proximity, it is a primary target in the search for Earth-like exoplan- ets. Despite a promising detection back in 2018, no planet orbiting Barnard’s star had been confirmed until now. The discovery of this new exoplanet — announced in a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astro- physics — is the result of observa- tions made over the last five years with ESO’s VLT, located at Paranal Observatory in Chile. “Even if it took a long time, we were always confident that we could find something,” says Jonay González Hernández, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Ca- narias in Spain, and lead author of the paper. The team were looking for signals from possible exoplanets within the habitable or temperate zone of Barnard’s star — the range where liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. Red dwarfs like Barnard’s star are often targeted by astronomers since low-mass rocky planets are easier to detect there than around larger Sun-like stars. Barnard b], as the newly discovered exoplanet is called, is twenty times closer to Barnard’s star than Mer- U sing ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have dis- covered a planet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest sin- gle star to our Sun. The planet, which has at least half the mass of Venus, was found via the gravitational tug it induces on its host star. This video summarises the discovery. [ESO]