Only the three stars that make up the Alpha Centauri system lie closer to us. The planets newly discovered around Barnard’s ...

The quartet of planets — named b, c, d and e — are some of the smallest rocky worlds ever detected. NASA says each has a mass ...

The nearest single star to the sun, Barnard’s star, has a brood of planets all its own. The red dwarf star, about six light-years from Earth, hosts four close-in planets each about two to three ...

Now European Southern Observatory (ESO) thinks one of the objects floating along the main belt might be the smallest dwarf planet in our solar system — an asteroid known as Hygiea. Hygiea isn ...

Planets beyond our solar system are called exoplanets. Those orbiting Barnard's star are among the smallest of the more than 5,800 exoplanets discovered since the 1990s as astronomers refine their ...

Now, four small planets have been found orbiting the star. Teams in America and Europe achieved this challenging detection by exploiting precision instruments on the world's largest telescopes.