An global team of scientists in London believe the celestial body, dubbed Proxima b, may be the closest possible home for life outside the Solar System.
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The featured image shows the sky location of Proxima Centauri in southern skies behind the telescope that made numerous discovery observations: ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile.
Proxima b has a mass around 1.3 times that of Earth, but orbits much closer to its star, circling it every 11 days.
Scientists have discovered an Earth-like planet, orbiting the closest star to our Sun, which has temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface and may be the nearest possible abode for life beyond our solar system.
“We hit the jackpot here”, said Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astrophysicist at the Queen Mary University of London and lead author of a study on the discovery in the journal Nature.
“We’re not detecting the planet at all, which is interesting, but from the behavior of the star we can infer it has a planetary companion”, Endl said. The planet is warm enough for liquid water, is nearly certainly rocky and terrestrial, and could even have an atmosphere. At the moment, we can only be sure that this planet does exist. The three planets are in orbit around a star known as TRAPPIST-1 and are “currently the best place to search for life beyond the solar system”, in the star’s “Goldilocks Zone”. Although way too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, a team of astronomers monitored it much of this year using HARPS spectrograph on the ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope at its La Silla observation site-one of three such locations in Chile. If life were to thrive on Proxima b, it would have to be on the side receiving light.
The discovery is consistent with results from the exoplanet community which suggests that the galaxy has planets in abundance, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the star nearest to our sun also hosts at least one planet.
Proxima b is the closest exoplanet, or planet orbiting a star other than the sun, to Earth.
Watch more on the discovery of Proxima B below.
Proxima b may not be flying solo.
“The excitement is that it’s around the closest star to our sun”, says Rory Barnes, also of the University of Washington, adding that it’s “exciting, too, to realize perhaps the next star over has a planet with life on it”.
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“We think it’s going to be rocky”, said Dr. Carolyn Sumners.
