4 Small Planets Discovered Orbiting Around A Star Close To Earth? All You Need To Know

Barnard’s Star, a small and dim red dwarf, is one of the closest stars to Earth. Even though its light takes only six years to reach us, it is too faint to be seen without a telescope. Recently, astronomers in America and Europe discovered four planets orbiting this star using advanced instruments on some of the world’s largest telescopes.

How the Planets Were Found

Barnard’s Star is much smaller than our Sun, closer in size to Jupiter. Unlike bright stars, its planets cannot be seen directly. Instead, scientists detected them by studying the star’s movement. When planets orbit a star, their gravity creates a small but detectable wobble. Using sensitive spectrograph instruments, astronomers measured these tiny shifts in the star’s motion. Spectrographs break the star’s light into different wavelengths, helping researchers track its movement.

One of the biggest challenges in finding planets around red dwarfs is the star’s own activity. Red dwarfs are full of magnetic storms, which can sometimes create false signals that resemble planets. To overcome this, astronomers need highly accurate instruments mounted on powerful telescopes. They also need to observe the star for many years and carefully filter out the effects of its magnetic activity before confirming the presence of planets.

Years of Research Confirm the Discovery

In 2024, a research team led by Jonay González Hernández from the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute studied Barnard’s Star for four years using the Espresso spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. They detected one definite planet and found hints of three more.

More recently, a team led by Ritvik Basant from the University of Chicago added three years of data from the Maroon-X instrument on the Gemini North telescope. Their analysis confirmed three of the four planets. When both datasets were combined, all four planets were confirmed to be real.

Why This Discovery Matters

Whenever new planets are found, scientists must ensure their findings are accurate. The fact that two independent teams, using different telescopes and methods, reached the same conclusion makes this discovery more reliable. The newly found planets are very close to Barnard’s Star, orbiting in just two to seven Earth days. By comparison, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, takes 88 days to complete one orbit.

What Are These Planets Like?

The four planets around Barnard’s Star are likely rocky, with surfaces exposed to intense radiation from the star. Because they orbit so close, they are too hot to have liquid water, and any atmosphere they might have had has probably been stripped away. Scientists looked for planets further away from the star, in the so-called “habitable zone,” where conditions might support life, but they found none.

Determining the sizes of these planets is difficult because they do not pass in front of the star from our perspective. When planets transit in front of their stars, they block some light, allowing scientists to measure their size. Since Barnard’s Star’s planets do not transit, they are harder to study in detail.

What This Tells Us About Planets in the Universe

The discovery of these planets gives scientists more insight into how planets form. They likely developed in a disk of gas and dust around Barnard’s Star when it was young. Over time, tiny particles stuck together, forming rocks and eventually planets. Since red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe, and most seem to have planets, astronomers believe there are likely more planets than stars in our galaxy.

Most known exoplanets are close to their stars, mainly because these are easier to detect. Their stronger gravitational pull makes their presence more noticeable, and their short orbits allow for faster observations. However, planets farther from their stars, within habitable zones, remain harder to find.

The European Space Agency’s Plato mission, set to launch in 2026, aims to find planets farther from their stars. Scientists hope this mission will identify more planets in habitable zones and provide insights into whether our solar system, which has no planets close to the Sun, is unusual.