'Breakthrough' discovery as scientists find 4 Earth-like planets (2025)

Astronomers have found not one, but four tiny planets circling one of our nearest stars

Scientists have just revealed that four small Earth-like planets are orbiting one of our closest stellar neighbours.

The "exciting" revelation is rewriting what we know about our galactic neighbourhood, and could even change the way we look for planets beyond our solar system.

Each new planet, weighing only 20 to 30 per cent of Earth's mass, circles our second-closest star system, Barnard’s Star, a mere six light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus.

"It's a really exciting find – Barnard's Star is our cosmic neighbour, and yet we know so little about it," said Ritvik Basant, Ph.D student at the University of Chicago and first author on the study. "It's signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations."

The newly detected planets, which have not yet been named, are "so close to their home star that they zip around the entire star in a matter of days," the researchers wrote. However, "That probably means they are too hot to be habitable," meaning alien lifeforms are unlikely to be living on these Earth-like worlds.

"A key requirement for habitability is the presence of liquid surface water,’ said Basant. "If a planet orbits too close to its star, any water would evaporate. If it’s too far, it would freeze. It turns out, all four planets orbiting Barnard’s star are too close to their host, making them too hot to sustain liquid water."

Finding nearby planets

For more than 100 years, astronomers have been trying to understand the secrets of Barnard's Star. Despite its proximity to Earth, finding planets around it has proven incredibly difficult.

However, thanks to some serious space detective work, including a powerful new tool called MAROON-X, a team of scientists was able to spot a tiny but crucial "wobble" in the star's movement – a telltale sign that planets are lurking nearby.

Researchers assumed that the star was circled by a gas giant, similar to Jupiter. However, the new study says astronomers have discovered that this wobbling is instead caused by the combined force of four smaller worlds.

The findings were independently confirmed in two different studies by different instruments, boosting confidence in the discovery.

"We observed at different times of night on different days. They're in Chile; we're in Hawaii. Our teams didn't coordinate with each other at all," Basant said. "That gives us a lot of assurance that these aren't phantoms in the data."

Lead author of the study, Professor Jacob Bean at the University of Chicago, described the discovery as "incredible".

"We worked on this data really intensely at the end of December, and I was thinking about it all the time," Bean said. "It was like, suddenly we know something that no one else does about the universe. We just couldn't wait to get this secret out.

"A lot of what we do can be incremental, and it's sometimes hard to see the bigger picture," he said. "But we found something that humanity will hopefully know forever. That sense of discovery is incredible."

The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.