A super-Earth orbits a famous star not far from our sun

Since the 1960s, scientists and exoplanet hunters have searched for evidence of planets orbiting one particular star. It’s called Barnard’s star and it’s only six light-years from our sun — a stone’s throw in a cosmic sense. 

Now, an international team of astronomers has managed to discover a possible planet, known as a super-Earth, orbiting the star.

Published in the journal Nature this week, the discovery was made by a team at Hawaii’s W. M. Keck Observatory, using, among other instruments, the observatory’s High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES).  

More about Science, Stars, Astronomy, Exoplanets, and Planets
Source: Mashable | A super-Earth orbits a famous star not far from our sun