Planet discovered around closest single star to the Sun

https://dtm.carnegiescience.edu/news/cold-super-earth-found-orbiting-second-closest-star-system-our-own

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0677-y

An international team including five Carnegie astronomers has discovered a frozen Super-Earth orbiting Barnard's star, the closest single star to our own Sun. The Planet Finding Spectrograph on Carnegie's Magellan II telescope was integral to the discovery, which is published in Nature.

Just six light-years from Earth, Barnard's star is our fourth-closest neighboring star overall, after Alpha Centauri's triple-star system. It is smaller and older than our Sun and among the least-active known red dwarfs.

To find this cold Super-Earth, the team—which included Carnegie's Paul Butler, Johanna Teske, Jeff Crane, Steve Shectman, and Sharon Wang—combined 20 years of data from seven different instruments, all of which were "stitched" together to form one of the largest and most-extensive datasets ever used for this method of planet detection.

"After a very careful analysis, we are over 99 percent confident that the planet is there," said lead author Ignasi Ribas of Spain's Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia.

Its quite interesting how they can analyze these large bodies and their composition when they're so far away.

Look at all these interesting planets we'll never set foot on. :P

I've always found it fascinating that they could detect objects' movements from so far away.

Nothing is more fascinating to me than discoveries like this. I could read about it all day.

And it's sad that most media outlets won't cover this. They're more interested in what some big imbecile posts on Twitter that day :(

Until Humanity develops FTL, no point in us getting all excited finding planet Earth 2.

yup. you're looking at capturing a photons that happen to pass through the thin film of an atmosphere wrapped around a planet light years away and make it to our detectors. pretty mind boggling.

well, he IS the President..

it takes it to a whole new level when you imagine it as physical. Hard to explain but I would look at a rock in New Mexico for example and say to myself 'there is literally a rock that looks just like that on mars someplace' and its real.

Right now as we speak there is very likely some form of life swimming around the underground lakes of Europa

I first learned of the underground lakes from History Channel's Universe and I kept thinking how awesome that would be if true. Seems we're so focused on finding life way out in the universe, we're not looking all that close enough for life within our own solar system.

yeah wonder why.

anyway...curiositystream...I think its 24/7 science shows. I wouldnt mind a subscription to that.

@tryit: Yeah same. Incredibly fascinating.

I think we should take care of our own planet first before worrying about other planets in our solar system or others. But I admit that it's still interesting.

there is some truth to that. The idea of moving to mars for example is silly.

if we can make life happen on a desert planet with temperatures down to -195 and constant radiation, and zero biological resources for our use, we should be able to make life work out here.

Well to be fair, detecting an extra-solar planet from Earth is a LOT easier than actually going out to Europa and then drilling through miles of ice in order to see what's underneath. I don't think it's a lack of interest, it's that finding life ANYWHERE else in the universe is really freaking hard.

Seriously, I would love to see what (if any) life is living in Europa's oceans. Granted, if it's there it's probably nothing like giant space fish but rather something similar to the kinds of worms that we see growing around geothermal vents in our own oceans. But hey...I like seeing about stuff like deep sea worms here, I'd surely love hearing about any deep sea worms from a moon orbiting another planet. That news would be awesome. The unfortunate reality though is that doing that would be really freaking hard. It's not even that we're more interested in life in other solar systems, we aren't exactly sending probes to other solar systems either.

That's a nice sentiment, but overall progress doesn't really work that way. Taking care of our own planet is a permanent never-ending thing (actually, LOTS of permanent never-ending things). If we put space exploration on hold until we've solved the "taking care of our planet" thing, then we would NEVER get around to exploring space.

It's sort of like if in a small tribe there were the problems of death by disease, death by warring tribes, and death by famine. I guess that tribe COULD determine which of these problems is most pressing and pour ALL of their efforts into solving it. But that's likely going to be less efficient than different people in the tribe each focusing on a different issue to solve. Societies sort of have to multitask.

Having said that, if you were referring to the simply mind-boggling costs associated with certain planned space expeditions, and the fact that at the moment we just can't afford to allocate the funds to those issues without taking away from more pressing Earthly matters, then I agree. I'm all for continued space exploration. But space exploration can get costly as f*** and sometimes we just can't afford to do what we'd really like to do. Some people lament the fact that we still haven't had people on Mars yet, but my stance is "GOOD". We're just not to the point where doing that is feasible, so we ought to stick with stuff that's less risky and less expensive. That kind of stuff will hopefully be feasible someday, but right now it's not.

Take me with you!

Could this mean that, in the distant past, this super-earth had... alien life?!