Located in the northern constellation of Ophiuchus, Barnard’s Star has long fascinated astronomers both due to its proximity to Earth and the fact that it has the largest apparent motion across our line of sight as any known stellar object. The candidate planet around Barnard’s star is a cold super-Earth, with a minimum mass of 3.2 times that of Earth, orbiting near its snow line (the minimum distance from the star at which volatile compounds could condense). But temperatures on the surface are expected to be mighty frigid, since the planet is only expected to receive about two percent of the solar radiation that Earth receives from our own Sun. "We used observations from seven different instruments, spanning 20 years of measurements, making this one of the largest and most extensive data sets ever used," Ribas said. Doppler spectroscopy uses measurements of a star’s radial velocity to determine how the star’s light is either redshifting away from us, or blueshifting towards us along our line of sight. Wochit 
 
 An artist’s conception of the planet that's in orbit around Barnard’s Star. The planet is located at only 40 percent of an Earth-Sun distance from its star, while its tiny habitable zone only extends to 12 percent of an Earth-Sun distance, Ignasi Ribas, the paper’s lead author and an astronomer at Spain’s Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia and the Institute of Space Sciences, told me. Kornmesser) 
 
 The planet lies well beyond the star's habitable zone in which liquid water, and possibly life, could exist.
– Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf star located in a solar system about six light-years away from Earth, may have some company. Researchers of the “exoplanet-hunting” group Red Dots have detected a planet—some 3.2 times the Earth’s mass and very cold—orbiting the star, Smithsonian reports. Their findings were published in Nature on Wednesday. “We firmly believe the object is there,” says lead researcher Ignasi Ribas. “We always have to remain a bit cautious … but we were sure enough that we were willing to go forward with publication.” The planet, Barnard’s Star b, is the second-closest exoplanet (a planet outside of our solar system) to Earth, per USA Today. Researchers looked at two decades worth of data from seven different telescopes to pick up the planet, according to Forbes. As for the possibility of life on Bernard’s Star b, the planet is "way too cold” to sustain liquid water, Ribas says, and whether life may be frozen beneath an ocean is just speculation at this point. During the course of their study, Smithsonian notes, researchers found faint evidence of another planet, which would be Barnard’s Star c. Several decades ago, scientists believed that they had detected planets around the star. However, those ended up being the result of an instrument problem. (Last year, scientists found the smallest possible star.)