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Young Planets Orbiting Red Dwarfs May Lack Ingredients for Life
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By NASA
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Citizen Scientists Use NASA Open Science Data to Research Life in Space
2023 Workshop of Analysis Working Group members, Washington, D.C., November 14, 2023. Now, you are invited to join their quest to understand how life can thrive in deep space! Want to learn more first? Join our live virtual event April 17 at 3pm Eastern Time to hear an overview of the OSDR AWG’s operations. Photo: NASA OSDR Team How can life thrive in deep space? The Open Science Data Repository Analysis Working Groups invite volunteers from all backgrounds to help answer this question. Request to join these citizen science groups to help investigate how life adapts to space environments, exploring topics like radiation effects, microgravity’s impact on human and plant health, and how microbes change in orbit.
Currently, nine Analysis Working Groups (AWGs) hold monthly meetings to advance their specific focus areas. Participants collaborate using an online platform, the AWG “Forum-Space”, where they connect with peers and experts, join discussions, and contribute to over 20 active projects.
The AWGs work with data primarily from the NASA Open Science Data Repository (OSDR), a treasure trove of spaceflight data on physiology, molecular biology, bioimaging, and much more. For newcomers, there are tutorials and a comprehensive paper covering all aspects of the repository and the AWG community. You can explore 500+ studies, an omics multi-study visualization portal, the environmental data app, and RadLab, a portal for radiation telemetry data. (“Omics” refers to fields of biology that end in “omics,” like “genomics”.)
Each of the nine AWGs has a Lead who organizes their group and holds monthly virtual meetings. Once you join, make sure to connect with the Lead and get on the agenda so you can introduce yourself. Learn more about the AWGs here.
Have an idea for a new project? Propose a new project and help lead it! From data analysis and visualization to shaping data standards and conducting literature meta-analyses, there’s a place for everyone to contribute. Request to join, and together, we can address a great challenge for humanity: understanding and enabling life to thrive in deep space!
Want to learn more?
On April 17 at 3pm Eastern Time, the NASA Citizen Science Leaders Series is hosting an virtual event with Ryan Scott about these Analysis Working Groups and their work. Ryan is the Science Lead for the Ames Life Sciences Data Archive and the liaison between the Open Data Science Repository and the Analysis Working Groups. Click here to register for this event!
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Last Updated Apr 01, 2025 Related Terms
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Explore This Section Exoplanets Home Exoplanets Overview Exoplanets Facts Types of Exoplanets Stars What is the Universe Search for Life The Big Questions Are We Alone? Can We Find Life? The Habitable Zone Why We Search Target Star Catalog Discoveries Discoveries Dashboard How We Find and Characterize Missions People Exoplanet Catalog Immersive The Exoplaneteers Exoplanet Travel Bureau 5 Ways to Find a Planet Strange New Worlds Universe of Monsters Galaxy of Horrors News Stories Blog Resources Get Involved Glossary Eyes on Exoplanets Exoplanet Watch More Multimedia ExEP This artist’s concept pictures the planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, as seen from close to the surface of one of them. Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld The Discovery
Four rocky planets much smaller than Earth orbit Barnard’s Star, the next closest to ours after the three-star Alpha Centauri system. Barnard’s is the nearest single star.
Key Facts
Barnard’s Star, six light-years away, is notorious among astronomers for a history of false planet detections. But with the help of high-precision technology, the latest discovery — a family of four — appears to be solidly confirmed. The tiny size of the planets is also remarkable: Capturing evidence of small worlds at great distance is a tall order, even using state-of-the-art instruments and observational techniques.
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Watching for wobbles in the light from a star is one of the leading methods for detecting exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. This “radial velocity” technique tracks subtle shifts in the spectrum of starlight caused by the gravity of a planet pulling its star back and forth as the planet orbits. But tiny planets pose a major challenge: the smaller the planet, the smaller the pull. These four are each between about a fifth and a third as massive as Earth. Stars also are known to jitter and quake, creating background “noise” that potentially could swamp the comparatively quiet signals from smaller, orbiting worlds.
Astronomers measure the back-and-forth shifting of starlight in meters per second; in this case the radial velocity signals from all four planets amount to faint whispers — from 0.2 to 0.5 meters per second (a person walks at about 1 meter per second). But the noise from stellar activity is nearly 10 times larger at roughly 2 meters per second.
How to separate planet signals from stellar noise? The astronomers made detailed mathematical models of Barnard’s Star’s quakes and jitters, allowing them to recognize and remove those signals from the data collected from the star.
The new paper confirming the four tiny worlds — labeled b, c, d, and e — relies on data from MAROON-X, an “extreme precision” radial velocity instrument attached to the Gemini Telescope on the Maunakea mountaintop in Hawaii. It confirms the detection of the “b” planet, made with previous data from ESPRESSO, a radial velocity instrument attached to the Very Large Telescope in Chile. And the new work reveals three new sibling planets in the same system.
Fun Facts
These planets orbit their red-dwarf star much too closely to be habitable. The closest planet’s “year” lasts a little more than two days; for the farthest planet, it’s is just shy of seven days. That likely makes them too hot to support life. Yet their detection bodes well in the search for life beyond Earth. Scientists say small, rocky planets like ours are probably the best places to look for evidence of life as we know it. But so far they’ve been the most difficult to detect and characterize. High-precision radial velocity measurements, combined with more sharply focused techniques for extracting data, could open new windows into habitable, potentially life-bearing worlds.
Barnard’s star was discovered in 1916 by Edward Emerson Barnard, a pioneering astrophotographer.
The Discoverers
An international team of scientists led by Ritvik Basant of the University of Chicago published their paper on the discovery, “Four Sub-Earth Planets Orbiting Barnard’s Star from MAROON-X and ESPRESSO,” in the science journal, “The Astrophysical Journal Letters,” in March 2025. The planets were entered into the NASA Exoplanet Archive on March 13, 2025.
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Last Updated Apr 01, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Norman Rockwell In his painting called Grissom and Young, American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell captures technicians helping NASA astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom suit up for the first flight of the Gemini program in March 1965. NASA loaned Norman Rockwell a Gemini spacesuit to make this painting as accurate as possible.
Since its beginning, NASA has used the power of art to communicate the extraordinary aspects of its missions in a way that connects uniquely with humanity. NASA’s original art program, started in 1962 under the direction of Administrator James Webb, included a diverse collection of works from artists such as Rockwell, Andy Warhol, and Annie Leibovitz.
See more art inspired by NASA.
Image credit: Norman Rockwell
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Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 5 Min Read NASA’s Webb Images Young, Giant Exoplanets, Detects Carbon Dioxide
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided the clearest look in the infrared yet at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. Full image below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI) NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured direct images of multiple gas giant planets within an iconic planetary system. HR 8799, a young system 130 light-years away, has long been a key target for planet formation studies.
The observations indicate that the well-studied planets of HR 8799 are rich in carbon dioxide gas. This provides strong evidence that the system’s four giant planets formed much like Jupiter and Saturn, by slowly building solid cores that attract gas from within a protoplanetary disk, a process known as core accretion.
The results also confirm that Webb can infer the chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres through imaging. This technique complements Webb’s powerful spectroscopic instruments, which can resolve the atmospheric composition.
“By spotting these strong carbon dioxide features, we have shown there is a sizable fraction of heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen, and iron, in these planets’ atmospheres,” said William Balmer, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Given what we know about the star they orbit, that likely indicates they formed via core accretion, which is an exciting conclusion for planets that we can directly see.”
Balmer is the lead author of the study announcing the results published today in The Astrophysical Journal. Balmer and their team’s analysis also includes Webb’s observation of a system 97 light-years away called 51 Eridani.
Image A: HR 8799 (NIRCam Image)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided the clearest look in the infrared yet at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. The closest planet to the star, HR 8799 e, orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star, which in our solar system would be located between the orbit of Saturn and Neptune. The furthest, HR 8799 b, orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, more than twice Neptune’s orbital distance. Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), revealing their intrinsic differences. A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph. In this image, the color blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to the 4.6 micron light. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI) Image B: 51 Eridani (NIRCam Image)
Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured this image of 51 Eridani b (also referred to as 51 Eri b), a cool, young exoplanet that orbits 890 million miles from its star, similar to Saturn’s orbit in our solar system. The 51 Eridani system is 97 light-years from Earth. This image includes filters representing 4.1-micron light as red. The background red in this image is not light from other planets, but a result of light subtraction during image processing. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI) HR 8799 is a young system about 30 million years old, a fraction of our solar system’s 4.6 billion years. Still hot from their tumultuous formation, the planets within HR 8799 emit large amounts of infrared light that give scientists valuable data on how they formed.
Giant planets can take shape in two ways: by slowly building solid cores with heavier elements that attract gas, just like the giants in our solar system, or when particles of gas rapidly coalesce into massive objects from a young star’s cooling disk, which is made mostly of the same kind of material as the star. The first process is called core accretion, and the second is called disk instability. Knowing which formation model is more common can give scientists clues to distinguish between the types of planets they find in other systems.
“Our hope with this kind of research is to understand our own solar system, life, and ourselves in the comparison to other exoplanetary systems, so we can contextualize our existence,” Balmer said. “We want to take pictures of other solar systems and see how they’re similar or different when compared to ours. From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is—or how normal.”
Image C: Young Gas Giant HR 8799 e (NIRCam Spectrum)
This graph shows a spectrum of one of the planets in the HR 8799 system, HR 8799 e. Spectral fingerprints of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide appear in data collected by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Olmsted (STScI) Of the nearly 6,000 exoplanets discovered, few have been directly imaged, as even giant planets are many thousands of times fainter than their stars. The images of HR 8799 and 51 Eridani were made possible by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) coronagraph, which blocks light from bright stars to reveal otherwise hidden worlds.
This technology allowed the team to look for infrared light emitted by the planets in wavelengths that are absorbed by specific gases. The team found that the four HR 8799 planets contain more heavy elements than previously thought.
The team is paving the way for more detailed observations to determine whether objects they see orbiting other stars are truly giant planets or objects such as brown dwarfs, which form like stars but don’t accumulate enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion.
“We have other lines of evidence that hint at these four HR 8799 planets forming using this bottom-up approach” said Laurent Pueyo, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who co-led the work. “How common is this for planets we can directly image? We don’t know yet, but we’re proposing more Webb observations to answer that question.”
“We knew Webb could measure colors of the outer planets in directly imaged systems,” added Rémi Soummer, director of STScI’s Russell B. Makidon Optics Lab and former lead for Webb coronagraph operations. “We have been waiting for 10 years to confirm that our finely tuned operations of the telescope would also allow us to access the inner planets. Now the results are in and we can do interesting science with it.”
The NIRCam observations of HR 8799 and 51 Eridani were conducted as part of Guaranteed Time Observations programs 1194 and 1412 respectively.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
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Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Roberto Molar Candanosa
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Mar 17, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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This artist’s concept depicts one of the possible scenarios for the 148780 Altjira system in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt. Credits:
NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) The puzzle of predicting how three gravitationally bound bodies move in space has challenged mathematicians for centuries, and has most recently been popularized in the novel and television show “3 Body Problem.” There’s no problem, however, with what a team of researchers say is likely a stable trio of icy space rocks in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, found using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
If confirmed as the second such three-body system found in the region, the 148780 Altjira system suggests there could be similar triples waiting to be discovered, which would support a particular theory of our solar system’s history and the formation of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs).
“The universe is filled with a range of three-body systems, including the closest stars to Earth, the Alpha Centauri star system, and we’re finding that the Kuiper Belt may be no exception,” said the study’s lead author Maia Nelsen, a physics and astronomy graduate of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Known since 1992, KBOs are primitive icy remnants from the early solar system found beyond the orbit of Neptune. To date, over 3,000 KBOs have been cataloged, and scientists estimate there could be several hundred thousand more that measure over 10 miles in diameter. The largest KBO is dwarf planet Pluto.
The Hubble finding is crucial support for a KBO formation theory, in which three small rocky bodies would not be the result of collision in a busy Kuiper Belt, but instead form as a trio directly from the gravitational collapse of matter in the disk of material surrounding the newly formed Sun, around 4.5 billion years ago. It’s well known that stars form by gravitational collapse of gas, commonly as pairs or triples, but that idea that cosmic objects like those in the Kuiper Belt form in a similar way is still under investigation.
This artist’s concept depicts one of the possible scenarios for the 148780 Altjira system in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt. It is likely a hierarchical triple formation, in which two very close companions are orbited by a third member at a greater distance. The inner bodies are too close together to be resolved by the Hubble Space Telescope. But Hubble observations of the orbit of the outermost object were used to determine that the central body is not a single spherical object. Other possibilities are that the inner object is a contact binary, where two separate bodies become so close they touch each other. Another idea is that the central body is oddly flat, like a pancake. Of the 40 identified binary objects in the Kuiper Belt, another system, Lempo, has been found to be a triple. The Altjira system is located in the outer reaches of the solar system, 3.7 billion miles away, or 44 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. In this artist’s concept, our Sun is in the constellation Sagittarius, with the Milky Way in the background. The bright red star Antares appears at the top center. Dust in the plane of our solar system glows as zodiacal light. NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) The Altjira system is located in the outer reaches of the solar system, 3.7 billion miles away, or 44 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Hubble images show two KBOs located about 4,700 miles (7,600 kilometers) apart. However, researchers say that repeated observations of the objects’ unique co-orbital motion indicate the inner object is actually two bodies that are so close together they can’t be distinguished at such a great distance.
“With objects this small and far away, the separation between the two inner members of the system is a fraction of a pixel on Hubble’s camera, so you have to use non-imaging methods to discover that it’s a triple,” said Nelsen.
This takes time and patience, Nelsen explained. Scientists have gathered a 17-year observational baseline of data from Hubble and the Keck Observatory, watching the orbit of the Altjira system’s outer object.
“Over time, we saw the orientation of the outer object’s orbit change, indicating that the inner object was either very elongated or actually two separate objects,” said Darin Ragozzine, also of Brigham Young University, a co-author of the Altjira study.
“A triple system was the best fit when we put the Hubble data into different modeling scenarios,” said Nelsen. “Other possibilities are that the inner object is a contact binary, where two separate bodies become so close they touch each other, or something that actually is oddly flat, like a pancake.”
Currently, there are about 40 identified binary objects in the Kuiper Belt. Now, with two of these systems likely triples, the researchers say it is more likely they are looking not at an oddball, but instead a population of three-body systems, formed by the same circumstances. However, building up that evidence takes time and repeated observations.
Recent research using data from the Keck Observatory and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a potential three-body system in the Kuiper Belt, known as the Altjira system. This discovery challenges traditional collision theories by suggesting that these triple systems might form directly from the gravitational collapse of material in the early solar disk.
Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Producer: Paul Morris The only Kuiper Belt objects that have been explored in detail are Pluto and the smaller object Arrokoth, which NASA’s New Horizons mission visited in 2015 and 2019, respectively. New Horizons showed that Arrokoth is a contact binary, which for KBOs means that two objects that have moved closer and closer to one another are now touching and/or have merged, often resulting in a peanut shape. Ragozzine describes Altjira as a “cousin” of Arrokoth, a member of the same group of Kuiper Belt objects. They estimate Altjira is 10 times larger than Arrokoth, however, at 124 miles (200 kilometers) wide.
While there is no mission planned to fly by Altjira to get Arrokoth-level detail, Nelsen said there is a different upcoming opportunity for further study of the intriguing system. “Altjira has entered an eclipsing season, where the outer body passes in front of the central body. This will last for the next ten years, giving scientists a great opportunity to learn more about it,” Nelsen said. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is also joining in on the study of Altjira as it will check if the components look the same in its upcoming Cycle 3 observations.
The Hubble study is published in The Planetary Science Journal.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
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Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Uncovering Icy Objects in the Kuiper Belt
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Reshaping Our Cosmic View: Hubble Science Highlights
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