Your new holiday hotspot could be four Earth-like planets twirling around one of our closest cosmic neighbours.
Well, maybe don’t go on SkyScanner just yet. It’s more likely a destination for your great-great-grandchildren. Or maybe great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.
Scientists have discovered four tiny planets circling our second-closest star system, Barnard’s Star.
The reddish ball of gas is only six light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus.
Since its discovery in 1916 – it was only found recently because it’s so dim – researchers have ‘discovered’ orbiting planets only to realise they’re flukes.
One hint at least one is some sort of gassy, giant exoplanet is making laps around Bernard is how the star wobbles, in much the same way as the Moon’s gravity nudges the Earth.
But a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the star’s jiggle isn’t because of one big planet’s gravity, it’s four tiny ones.
Each of these planets, the researchers wrote in the March 11 study, is about four times the size of Mercury, or about 20% the mass of Earth.
‘It’s a really exciting find,’ study lead author Ritvik Basant, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, said.
‘Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbour, and yet we know so little about it.’
These four planets are so close to their star that a year is only a few days long.
Sadly, don’t expect any aliens to be hanging out on any of them. Much like Mercury, them being so close to their sun means they ‘are too hot to be habitable’.
‘A key requirement for habitability is the presence of liquid surface water,’ said Basant.
‘If a planet orbits too close to its star, any water would evaporate. If it’s too far, it would freeze. It turns out, all four planets orbiting Barnard’s star are too close to their host, making them too hot to sustain liquid water.’
But this doesn’t mean life will never exist on these giant rocks forever.
Bernard’s Star was identified as early as the 1970s as a top contender for a nearby star system humankind will visit using near-future technology, such as nuclear fusion engines.
Or, as one nanotechnologist suggested in 1980, a self-replicating spacecraft that would read the red Edward in less than 50 years.
Red dwarfs, among the smallest types of stars, have long been happy hunting grounding for planet chasers.
As drab as they are, their light can still be so brilliant that it’s tricky for astronomers to make out any planets orbiting them.
But they are easily wobbled by planets orbiting them, a tactic that helps astronomers confirm that three small rocks circle Proxima Centauri, part of a triplet star system even closer to us than Barnard’s Star, about four light-years away.
These rocks might not sound too thrilling, but scientists like UChicago Professor Jacob Bean pay close attention to them in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Bean and his team are being MAROON-X, a powerful instrument attached to the Gemini Telescope on a Hawaiian mountaintop that scans the skies for wobbling stars.
These new findings, which come after more than a century of searching, confirm that rocky planets are in the Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s star systems.
‘We worked on this data really intensely at the end of December, and I was thinking about it all the time,’ Bean said.
‘It was like, suddenly we know something that no one else does about the universe. We just couldn’t wait to get this secret out.
‘A lot of what we do can be incremental, and it’s sometimes hard to see the bigger picture.
‘But we found something that humanity will hopefully know forever. That sense of discovery is incredible.’
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