BARNARD’S STAR B

About:

• Barnard's Star is a type of faint, low-mass star called a red dwarf. Red dwarfs are considered to be the best places to look for exoplanet candidates, which are planets outside our solar system.
  
  
• Location: It is located about 6 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Ophiuchus. It is the fourth nearest known individual star to the Sun (after the three components of the Alpha Centauri system).
  
  
• Nomenclature: The star is named after the American astronomer E. E. Barnard. He was not the first to observe the star, but in 1916 he measured its proper motion as 10.3 arcseconds per year relative to the Sun.
  
  
• Age: At 7–12 billion years of age, Barnard's Star is considerably older than the Sun, which is 4.5 billion years old, and it might be among the oldest stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
  
  

Barnard's Star b:

• In November 2018 an international team of astronomers announced the detection of a super-Earth orbiting in relatively close proximity to Barnard's Star.
  
  
• The planet lies at a distant region from the star known as the ‘snow line’. This is well beyond the habitable zone in which liquid water, and possibly life, could exist.
  
  
• It has a proposed mass of 3.2 Earths. The planet is most likely frigid, with an estimated surface temperature of about -170° C.
  
  
• Barnard’s star b is the second closest known exoplanet to our Sun. The closest lies just over four light-years from Earth. That exoplanet, Proxima b, orbits around the red dwarf Proxima Centauri.
  
  
• The researchers used the radial velocity method during the observations that led to the discovery of Barnard’s star b. This technique detects wobbles in a star which are likely to be caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.