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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 14 2018, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the with-an-oink-oink-here-and-a...oh,-wait dept.

Exoplanet discovered around neighbouring star

Astronomers have discovered a planet around one of the closest stars to our Sun.

Nearby planets like this are likely to be prime targets in the search for signatures of life, using the next generation of telescopes.

The planet's mass is thought to be more than three times that of our own, placing it in a category of world know as "super-Earths".

It orbits Barnard's star, which sits "just" six light-years away.

Writing in the journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0677-y] [DX], Guillem Anglada Escudé and colleagues say this newly discovered world has a mass 3.2 times bigger than the Earth's.

Barnard's Star.

Also at phys.org.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:03AM (#762007)

    They probably have to send a probe to the nearest one, predict what it should look like, image the planet, then send back the image. If the guess at what it looks like (and it even exists) is good, then great.