{"id":16659,"date":"2024-11-17T09:00:51","date_gmt":"2024-11-17T10:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=16659"},"modified":"2024-11-17T10:35:26","modified_gmt":"2024-11-17T10:35:26","slug":"barnards-star-finally-has-a-planet-and-possibly-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=16659","title":{"rendered":"Barnard\u2019s Star Finally Has a Planet, and Possibly More"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For a century, exoplanet hunters have \u201cdiscovered\u201d planets around a nearby star, only to retract the claims. But the latest find is for real.<\/p>\n

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Barnard\u2019s Star is a dim, reddish ball of gas just six light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. It is the nearest stand-alone star to our sun, but with only one-fifth the mass, it is so dim that no one knew it was there until 1916, when the astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard recorded its image on a photographic plate.<\/p>\n

Ever since, astronomers have been \u201cdiscovering\u201d planets around Barnard\u2019s Star, but none have withstood verification. Now, one planet \u2014 and maybe more \u2014 has been confirmed.<\/p>\n

In 1963, long before the search for exoplanets became a respectable endeavor, Peter van de Kamp, a Dutch astronomer at Swarthmore College\u2019s Sproul Observatory in Pennsylvania, announced that Barnard\u2019s Star had a planet. Astrometric measurements, he said, showed that the star wobbled in its path across the sky. Dr. van de Kamp attributed the wobble to the gravitational tug of a planet with the mass of Jupiter.<\/p>\n

The claim made headlines, but nobody else could replicate the finding. The wobble was eventually traced not to a planet but to anomalies in the 24-inch telescope.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But as Paul Butler, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Washington Post<\/a>, Barnard\u2019s Star is \u201cthe great white whale\u201d of exoplanet hunts.<\/p>\n

Dr. Butler was part of a team in 2018 that announced having found a much smaller planet orbiting Barnard\u2019s Star, as part of what they called the Red Dots campaign. Barnard Star b, as the entity was designated, was about three times as massive as Earth and circled the star every 233 days \u2014 but at too great a distance to be warmed sufficiently to support life.<\/p>\n

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For a century, exoplanet hunters have \u201cdiscovered\u201d planets around a nearby star, only to retract the claims. But the latest find is for real.Barnard\u2019s Star is a dim, reddish ball of gas just six light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. It is the nearest stand-alone star to our sun, but with only one-fifth the mass, it is so dim that no one knew it was there until 1916, when the astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard recorded its image on a photographic plate.Ever since, astronomers have been \u201cdiscovering\u201d planets around Barnard\u2019s Star, but none have withstood verification. Now, one planet \u2014 and maybe more \u2014 has been confirmed.In 1963, long before the search for exoplanets became a respectable endeavor, Peter van de Kamp, a Dutch astronomer at Swarthmore College\u2019s Sproul Observatory in Pennsylvania, announced that Barnard\u2019s Star had a planet. Astrometric measurements, he said, showed that the star wobbled in its path across the sky. Dr. van de Kamp attributed the wobble to the gravitational tug of a planet with the mass of Jupiter.The claim made headlines, but nobody else could replicate the finding. The wobble was eventually traced not to a planet but to anomalies in the 24-inch telescope.But as Paul Butler, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Washington Post, Barnard\u2019s Star is \u201cthe great white whale\u201d of exoplanet hunts.Dr. Butler was part of a team in 2018 that announced having found a much smaller planet orbiting Barnard\u2019s Star, as part of what they called the Red Dots campaign. Barnard Star b, as the entity was designated, was about three times as massive as Earth and circled the star every 233 days \u2014 but at too great a distance to be warmed sufficiently to support life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16661,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16659"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16662,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16659\/revisions\/16662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}