Tiny Earth Light Years Away

The nearest single star to the Solar System has just yielded up a rare and wonderful treasure.

Around a red dwarf known as Barnard's star, which lies just 5.96 light-years away, astronomers have found evidence of an exoplanet.


And not just any exoplanet. This fascinating world, known as Barnard b, is tiny, clocking in with a minimum mass of 37 percent of the mass of Earth. That's a little shy of half a Venus, and about 3.5 Marses.


The reason it's so marvelous is that tiny exoplanets are really, really hard to find. Although Barnard b is not habitable to life as we know it, its discovery is leading us closer to the identification of Earth-sized worlds that may be scattered elsewhere throughout the galaxy.  READ MORE...