Barnard’s Star Finally Has a Planet, and Possibly More
The New York Times
For a century, exoplanet hunters have “discovered” planets around a nearby star, only to retract the claims. But the latest find is for real.
Barnard’s Star is a dim, reddish ball of gas just six light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. It is the nearest stand-alone star to our sun, but with only one-fifth the mass, it is so dim that no one knew it was there until 1916, when the astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard recorded its image on a photographic plate.
Ever since, astronomers have been “discovering” planets around Barnard’s Star, but none have withstood verification. Now, one planet — and maybe more — has been confirmed.
In 1963, long before the search for exoplanets became a respectable endeavor, Peter van de Kamp, a Dutch astronomer at Swarthmore College’s Sproul Observatory in Pennsylvania, announced that Barnard’s Star had a planet. Astrometric measurements, he said, showed that the star wobbled in its path across the sky. Dr. van de Kamp attributed the wobble to the gravitational tug of a planet with the mass of Jupiter.
The claim made headlines, but nobody else could replicate the finding. The wobble was eventually traced not to a planet but to anomalies in the 24-inch telescope.
But as Paul Butler, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Washington Post, Barnard’s Star is “the great white whale” of exoplanet hunts.
Dr. Butler was part of a team in 2018 that announced having found a much smaller planet orbiting Barnard’s Star, as part of what they called the Red Dots campaign. Barnard Star b, as the entity was designated, was about three times as massive as Earth and circled the star every 233 days — but at too great a distance to be warmed sufficiently to support life.
The unidentified patient had recently returned from Africa, where the virus has caused a deadly epidemic, health officials said.
The event produces some of the year’s fastest meteors, although the nearly full moon may make them challenging to spot.
Mr. Musk dug into his companies’ budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.
Behind the scenes at a Chicago zoo, chimpanzees who spent years entertaining humans are learning to befriend their own kind.
The agency’s top medical official was responding to rumors that Suni Williams had lost an unusual amount of weight during an extended stay in orbit.
Artificial intelligence has become a subject for people in the art and theater worlds who are worried about being replaced by it.
President-elect Trump says tariffs will help American businesses, but many in the wine industry foresee few benefits and a lot of pain for all involved.
Ball pythons were long assumed to be solitary, but scientists discovered the snakes in captivity prefer each others’ company when given the chance to live socially.
The Justice Department and four Democratic state attorneys general argued that United’s takeover would limit competition and harm consumers needing home or hospice care.
It took nearly 25 years for biologists to discover that a swimming and glowing organism in the ocean’s midnight zone was actually a sea slug.
When asked about whether President-elect Donald Trump would prevent a TikTok ban in the United States, a spokeswoman told The New York Times: “He will deliver.”