November 16, 2018
Super Earth at Barnard's Star
Timothy Birdnow
A super-Earth has been found orbiting Barnard's Star, a red dwarf sun six light years from our solar system.
Space Daily gives us the story:
"An international group of astronomers, involving the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, has succeeded in detecting a planet around Barnard's star, which is only six lightyears away.
The planet has just over three times the mass of Earth and is slightly colder than Saturn. The discovery was made by measuring the periodic change in the radial velocity of the parent star. The spectrograph CARMENES, developed to a large part by the MPIA, played an important role in this discovery.
But now astronomers have extracted a signal from 771 individual measurements they have collected over the recent 20 years, which points to a planet that at a distance of 0.4 astronomical units (1 au = 150 million km, mean distance between Sun and Earth) travels around its host star once within 233 days. The planet has been named Barnard's star b.
End excerpt.
Barnard's Star is the closest star to Earth that is a single system. Alpha Centuri, for instance, is a triple star system featuring the red dwarf Proxima, Alpha A (nearly identical to our sun), and Alpha b, another yellow star but smaller and cooler.
The discoverers theorize that Barnard B. is a cold desert:
"Since Barnard's star, a red dwarf star, only emits 0.4% of the Sun's radiant power, the planet Barnard's star b only receives about 2% of the intensity the Earth collects from the Sun. From this, the scientists conclude that the planet with an average temperature of about -170C is probably a hostile, icy desert, in which there is no liquid water. With a mass of at least 3.3 Earth masses, it belongs to the class of super-earths, i.e. exoplanets that fill the mass scale between Earth and Neptune."
End excerpt.
I wonder; certainly Saturn's moon Titan has a thick atmosphere and methane lakes. While Barnard B might not have liquid water, could it have liquid methane? Ah, but then it's close to the star, which may well have torn away the atmosphere over the course of time.
We live in exciting times.
A super-Earth has been found orbiting Barnard's Star, a red dwarf sun six light years from our solar system.
Space Daily gives us the story:
"An international group of astronomers, involving the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, has succeeded in detecting a planet around Barnard's star, which is only six lightyears away.
The planet has just over three times the mass of Earth and is slightly colder than Saturn. The discovery was made by measuring the periodic change in the radial velocity of the parent star. The spectrograph CARMENES, developed to a large part by the MPIA, played an important role in this discovery.
But now astronomers have extracted a signal from 771 individual measurements they have collected over the recent 20 years, which points to a planet that at a distance of 0.4 astronomical units (1 au = 150 million km, mean distance between Sun and Earth) travels around its host star once within 233 days. The planet has been named Barnard's star b.
End excerpt.
Barnard's Star is the closest star to Earth that is a single system. Alpha Centuri, for instance, is a triple star system featuring the red dwarf Proxima, Alpha A (nearly identical to our sun), and Alpha b, another yellow star but smaller and cooler.
The discoverers theorize that Barnard B. is a cold desert:
"Since Barnard's star, a red dwarf star, only emits 0.4% of the Sun's radiant power, the planet Barnard's star b only receives about 2% of the intensity the Earth collects from the Sun. From this, the scientists conclude that the planet with an average temperature of about -170C is probably a hostile, icy desert, in which there is no liquid water. With a mass of at least 3.3 Earth masses, it belongs to the class of super-earths, i.e. exoplanets that fill the mass scale between Earth and Neptune."
End excerpt.
I wonder; certainly Saturn's moon Titan has a thick atmosphere and methane lakes. While Barnard B might not have liquid water, could it have liquid methane? Ah, but then it's close to the star, which may well have torn away the atmosphere over the course of time.
We live in exciting times.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:09 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 373 words, total size 3 kb.
20kb generated in CPU 0.0156, elapsed 0.8291 seconds.
35 queries taking 0.8232 seconds, 158 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
35 queries taking 0.8232 seconds, 158 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
