A Planet Around Barnard's Star

Post date: Nov 14, 2018 6:13:12 PM

Ribas et al. (2018) recently announced the discovery of a small planet around Barnard's Star, the second closest stellar system to our Sun. Here is an artistic representation of the planet (Fig. 1) and its orbit (Fig. 2). We are currently studying the properties of Barnard's Star from the Arecibo Observatory.

Fig 1. Artistic representation of the planet around Barnard's Star as a frozen ocean world with a thick Titan-like hazy atmosphere.

Fig. 2. The orbit of Barnard's Star b. The eccentricity of the orbit is not well constrained and it could be more circular. The plot shows the tidal lock and snow lines (canonical values), the habitable zone, and a thermal analysis of the orbit. Temperature estimates are based on an albedo of 0.3, similar to Earth (0.29) and Titan (0.22).