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Say hello to our new neighbor.Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile have confirmed that Barnard's star, the closest single star to our Solar System lying just six light years away, has a planet of its own.
"Barnard b is one of the lowest-mass exoplanets known and one of the few known with a mass less than that of Earth," said study lead author Jonay González Hernández, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, in a According to the findings, Barnard b is about twenty times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun. Thanks to the extreme proximity to its star, its surface temperature is a little over 250 degrees Fahrenheit, which still makes it colder than Mercury and Venus.. Red dwarfs are the smallest main sequence stars, and exhibit their vermilion hue because they burn at relatively low temperatures. Their subdued luminosity, however, makes it easier to check if they have any planets.
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