Studying two decades of data on Barnard’s Star, astronomers have found a rocky super-Earth with a mass of at least 2.3 times that of Earth that orbits the star every 233 days or so.
The Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) has successfully made its first observations.
The 20 new worlds have been found around eight bright, Sun-like stars by the HARPS Echelle Spectograph instrument, mounted on the 3.6m telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
Are there Earth-like planets in a neighboring star system? A new campaign called “Pale Red Dot” aims to show the public in real-time how to push astronomy to its limits to possibly find out.
Astronomers using ESO's leading exoplanet hunter HARPS have today announced more than fifty newly discovered planets around other stars. Among these are many rocky planets not much heavier than the Earth. One of them in particular seems to orbit in the habitable zone around its star. In this video news release we look at how astronomers discover these distant worlds and what the future may hold for finding rocky worlds like the Earth that may support life.
