Barnard’s Star Finally Has a Planet, and Possibly More

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.