The nearest single star to the Solar System has just yielded up a rare and wonderful treasure, writes the Science Alert.

Around a red dwarf known as Barnard’s star, which lies just 5.96 light-years away, astronomers have found evidence of an exoplanet.

And not just any exoplanet. This fascinating world, known as Barnard b, is tiny, clocking in with a minimum mass of 37 percent of the mass of Earth. That’s a little shy of half a Venus, and about 2.5 Marses.

The reason it’s so marvelous is that tiny exoplanets are really, really hard to find. Although Barnard b is not habitable to life as we know it, its discovery is leading us closer to the identification of Earth-sized worlds that may be scattered elsewhere throughout the galaxy.

The discovery follows hints of a possible planetary signal orbiting the star in 2018. That hypothesized exoplanet was thought to be around three times the mass of Earth, orbiting at a distance of about 0.4 astronomical units.

Though any planet matching that mass or distance is yet to be confirmed, the more teensy Barnard b emerged after researchers conducted a careful campaign to observe the star. What’s more, there might be three more exoplanets lurking even further from the star, out where they’re harder to spot.

“Even if it took a long time”, says astronomer Jonay González Hernández of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands in Spain, “we were always confident that we could find something”.