Confirmed at last: exoplanets found around nearest single star | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2025

Barnard’s star, the closest singlet star system to ours, has long been a target for planet-hunters. We’ve finally confirmed it: they exist!

Since we first realized that Earth was just another planet orbiting our Sun — like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn — we’ve been compelled to wonder whether the other stars in our night sky possessed planets like we do. This question went wholly unanswered, from a scientific perspective, until the definitive detection of exoplanets first arrived: back in 1992. In the time since, we’ve discovered and confirmed more than 5000 exoplanets, including:

• rocky exoplanets smaller than Earth,
• Earth-sized exoplanets,
• super-Earth exoplanets that are likely to be rocky,
• mini-Neptune exoplanets that are likely to have thick gas envelopes,
• Neptune-sized worlds that are more than a dozen times as massive as Earth,
• Jupiter-like exoplanets that are enormous, massive, and puffy,
• and even super-Jupiter worlds that approach the mass of brown dwarfs.