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Astronomers have revealed new evidence that there are not just one but four tiny planets circling around Barnard's Star, the second-nearest star system to Earth. The four planets, each only about 20 to 30% the mass of Earth, are so close to their home star that they zip around the entire star in a matter of days. That probably means they are too hot to be habitable, but the find is a new benchmark for discovering smaller planets around nearby stars. "It's a really exciting find -- Barnard's Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about...

Astronomers have finally found a planet around the closest single star to the Sun — and there are probably more worlds in this system. The find settles years of controversy.Some stars seem like perfect targets for exoplanet hunters. Barnard's star is certainly one of them: At only six light-years from the Sun in the direction of Ophiuchus, it is the nearest single star and the second-nearest star system after Alpha Centauri. It's so close that you can detect its movement across the sky in photographs taken just a few years apart.Claims of planetary companions to Barnard's star have been made...

The red dwarf star itself emits only about 0.4% of our sun's radiance, so the planet receives about 2% of the intensity that Earth receives from its sun. This is because Barnard's star is in the class of M dwarf stars, cooler and less massive than our sun. It's also an old star that predates our own solar system. The planet is about the same orbital distance from its star as Mercury is from our sun, making a full pass around the star every 233 days. This places it in the "snow line" of the star, where it's cold enough...

Stars Passing Close to the Sunby Paul Gilster on January 2, 2015 Every time I mention stellar distances I’m forced to remind myself that the cosmos is anything but static. Barnard’s Star, for instance, is roughly six light years away, a red dwarf that was the target of the original Daedalus starship designers back in the 1970s. But that distance is changing. If we were a species with a longer lifetime, we could wait about eight thousand years, at which time Barnard’s Star would close to less than four light years. No star shows a larger proper motion relative to...

Also cataloged as Munich 15040 or LFT 1385, Barnard's Star was discovered in 1916 by E.E. Barnard to have the largest known proper motion of all stars, 10.29 arc seconds per year, by comparing photographic plates obtained in 1894 and 1916, and later tracing it back to 1888 in E. Pickering's plate archive. This star moves apparently fast between the background stars in Ophiuchus, needing only about 350 years for 1 degree, in almost exactly North direction (Burnham gives a position angle of 356 degrees). This star is the second nearest to our Solar System at 5.97 light years, only...

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size of Mars. All three planets are thought to be rocky like Earth but orbit close to their star, making them too hot to be in the habitable zone, which is the region where liquid water could exist. Of the more than 700 planets confirmed to orbit other stars, called exoplanets, only a handful are...

Newly-Discovered Star may be Third-Closest Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The local celestial neighborhood just got more crowded with a discovery of a star that may be the third closest to the Sun. The star, "SO25300.5+165258," is a faint red dwarf star estimated to be about 7.8 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aries. "Our new stellar neighbor is a pleasant surprise, since we weren't looking for it," said Dr. Bonnard Teegarden, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Teegarden is lead author of a paper announcing...