Discovered: Two New Planets for Kapteyn’s Star

The exoplanet discoveries have been coming fast and furious this week, as astronomers announced a new set of curious worlds this past Monday at the ongoing American Astronomical Society’s 224th Meeting being held in Boston, Massachusetts.

Now, chalk up two more worlds for a famous red dwarf star in our own galactic neck of the woods. An international team of astronomers including five researchers from the Carnegie Institution announced the discovery this week of two exoplanets orbiting Kapteyn’s Star, about 13 light years distant. The discovery was made utilizing data from the HIRES spectrometer at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as the Planet Finding Spectrometer at the Magellan/Las Campanas Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla facility, both located in Chile.

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This is brand new. Not only is Kapteyn’s star one of the nearest stars, but it’s also very fast moving because it’s a low-metallicity halo star, also a strange type of star called a subdwarf.

That means that Kapteyn’s star is by far the oldest star in out neighbourhood, much older than the Sun, and that makes these planets exceptionally old, too, and condensed out of a gas cloud that had very few planet-forming elements in it.