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March 28, 2024, 11:58:56 AM

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New exoplanet next door

Started by Alberon, November 14, 2018, 10:58:22 PM

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Alberon

Exoplanets, that is planets going around other stars, are found fairly regularly these days. Thousands of them have been detected throughout The Milky Way. But a new one has been detected virtually on our doorstep. It's a super-Earth going around Barnard's Star, just six light years away.



QuoteWriting in the journal Nature, Guillem Anglada Escudé and colleagues say this newly discovered world has a mass 3.2 times bigger than the Earth's.

"We think that this is what we call a Super-Earth - that would be possibly a mostly rocky planet with a massive atmosphere. It's probably very rich in volatiles like water, hydrogen, carbon dioxide - things like this. Many of them are frozen on the surface," the astronomer, from Queen Mary University of London, told BBC News.

The newly discovered planet is only as far away from its sun as Mercury is from ours, but since Barnard's Star is much dimmer than the Sun it is beyond the point where life is probably possible. Although,

QuoteOn distance alone, it's estimated that temperatures would be about -150C on the planet's surface. However, a massive atmosphere could potentially warm the planet, making conditions more hospitable to life.

QuoteThe researchers used the radial velocity method for their detection. The technique can detect "wobbles" in a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

These wobbles also affect the light coming from the star. As it moves towards Earth its light appears shifted towards the blue part of the spectrum and, as it moves away, it appears shifted towards the red.

"This planet is particularly complicated because the orbital period (the time to complete one full orbit of the host star) is 233 days. In one year, you only see one part of the cycle, and you have to cover it over many years to be sure that it's repeating," Dr Anglada Escudé told me.

The team re-examined archived data obtained from two astronomical surveys over a 20-year period. They also added new observations with the Carmenes spectrometer in Almeria, Spain, the Eso/Harps instrument in Chile and the Harps-N instrument in the Canary Islands.

It's the first time the radial velocity technique has been used to detect a planet this small so far away from its host star.

It's not possible to see the new planet directly, but in the near future that might be achievable.

Quotein the US, they are also developing WFirst - a small telescope that's also used for cosmology," said Dr Anglada Escudé.

"If you take the specs of how it should perform, it should easily image this planet. When we have the image we can then start to do spectroscopy - looking at different wavelengths, in the optical, in the infrared, looking at whether light is absorbed at different colours, meaning there are different things in the atmosphere."

Barnard's Star b is the second closet known exoplanet to the Solar System. The other being Proxima Centauri b discovered a couple of years back. And there could be more in the same star system.

QuoteThis is not the first time there have been claims of a planet around Barnard's Star. In the 1960s, the Dutch astronomer Peter van de Kamp, working in the US, published his evidence for a planetary companion, based on perturbations in the motion of the star.

However, van de Kamp's claims proved controversial, as other scientists were not able to reproduce his finding.

"The new planet is impossible for Peter van de Kamp to have detected. The signal would have been too small for the technique he was using," said Guillem Anglada Escudé.

However, the new data contain tentative hints of a second planet orbiting Barnard's Star even further out than the Super-Earth.

"The new data does show evidence for a long period object. That object may - it has a very low probability - of being the van de Kamp planet. But it's a long shot," said Anglada Escudé.

Apropos of nothing - Barnard's Star is moving quite fast relative to us. In under ten thousand years it will close to just 3.75 light years away.


garnish

How far away is it compared to say, Mars

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: garnish on November 14, 2018, 11:12:53 PM
How far away is it compared to say, Mars

Mars is roughly two-&-a-half light-minutes from earth. so, one-&-a-quarter million times as far. roughly.

Captain Z

Come on, let's use the SI unit, how many double-decker buses is that?

Blumf

Quote from: Alberon on November 14, 2018, 10:58:22 PM
Apropos of nothing - Barnard's Star is moving quite fast relative to us. In under ten thousand years it will close to just 3.75 light years away.




Captain Z

[tag] in my neighbourhood [/tag]

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: Captain Z on November 14, 2018, 11:33:44 PM
Come on, let's use the SI unit, how many double-decker buses is that?

3.3x1010 end-to-end.

zomgmouse

Next door eh oh yeah how do you fit an entire planet in a bungalow didn't think so mate think again

kittens

get a man on it. somebody put a man on this new planet, earth 2. with its MASSIVE atmosphere it's sure to be a hit. imagine if they got some funny aliens. maybe just a big load of rocks or is there a yoda flipping about the place with his robot mate. legends of earth 2. funny little green yoda dude but he got a 6 pack and a huge dick and his best mate is a robot. nice to think about at least.

Bhazor

I hope we don't get more of these articles when they discover the next 10^13^27 lumps of rock in the milkyway. As if planets are some kind of anomaly. We haven't even touched 7 of the planets in our solar system and now they're trying to hype up this shit?

Blumf

Quote from: zomgmouse on November 16, 2018, 12:31:17 AM
Next door eh oh yeah how do you fit an entire planet in a bungalow didn't think so mate think again

Hidden behind the leylandii

kittens

did you know they don't even know about the ocean as much as of space and that's on EARTH already

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Alberon on November 14, 2018, 10:58:22 PM
However, the new data contain tentative hints of a second planet orbiting Barnard's Star even further out than the Super-Earth.

Don't they know these are the planetoid Cooke and the planet Birminghamworld?

kittens

maybe there's a special type of squid in the ocean that no one ever thought of before now and we're wasting money locating other planets makes me sick an actual new larger kind of squid and i'm not gonna know about it for another six years or so because we're wasting time looking at a god damn planet with a great big atmosphere when we should be looking on our own planet and just getting to the bottom of whether or not this squid is even there let alone how large it is.


Paul Calf

[tag]There goes the Western Spiral Arm...[/tag]

zomgmouse

Quote from: kittens on November 16, 2018, 01:11:05 AM
maybe there's a special type of squid in the ocean that no one ever thought of before now and we're wasting money locating other planets makes me sick an actual new larger kind of squid and i'm not gonna know about it for another six years or so because we're wasting time looking at a god damn planet with a great big atmosphere when we should be looking on our own planet and just getting to the bottom of whether or not this squid is even there let alone how large it is.

Ah ok but have you (hmm) considered there might be a new big bad squid out in space????

New Jack

'Only' six light years away? Mate, I don't even drive

Norton Canes

A massive atmosphere? I love a planet with a massive atmosphere

Blumf


Sorry Monkeys

Quote from: Norton Canes on November 16, 2018, 11:32:07 AM
A massive atmosphere? I love a planet with a massive atmosphere

So let me take you there- and you and I'll be dancin' in the cool night air :)

steve98

At minus 150 degrees, it's a bit too cool Russ.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

They need to figure out a way of actually getting photographs of these exoplanets sharpish, before everybody loses interest. It's hard to get excited about something you can't see. Bit like atoms. Imagine if one of the first pictures that came back was of a blue green planet though, like Earth. Oh golly.

Alberon

But if it turned out the blue and green were just paint everyone would give up on space in disgust.

We just can't take the risk.