At 25 trillion miles away, Proxima Centauri is our closest neighboring star.
Advertisement
The proximity of the star system is what makes the new discovery so exciting for scientists.
Now, we’ve been discovering thousands of planets, and quite a few Earth-like ones, for a few years now. And it appears to be nearly perfectly set up to serve as a home for alien life.
The one catch is that Promixa Centauri also generates a lot of solar flares and radiation that could possibly turn any life on the planet into toast. This area which is not to close, but not too far from the sun is called the Goldilocks Zone.
Scientists hope to be able to explore the planet more to try and find life. Dr. Mikko Tuomi says “It is the closest possible planet to us and may be the closest to support life outside the solar system”.
“The search for life starts now, ” says Guillem Anglada-Escudé, an astronomer at Queen Mary University of London and leader of the team that made the discovery. Pictured, an artistic rendering shows what the red dwarf star might look like from the surface of the newly discovered exoplanet, Proxima b. Named Proxima B, the planet sits about 4.6 million miles from the star-much closer than Earth, which orbits about 90 million miles from the Sun. It’s conceivable that we could send robotic probes to explore this planet in the coming decades. Researchers also believe Proxima b is without seasons. That’s because it is likely that only one side of it ever faces its star. This planet is known as Proxima b and it orbits very close to its cool parent star with an orbit completed every 11 days. This means scientists don’t now know if the planet has an atmosphere, possesses a magnetosphere or has liquid water.
Proxima b, however, isn’t a hellishly hot world because of this since its red dwarf sun is much cooler and fainter than our sun.
The findings are based on data collected over 16 years of working with European Southern Observatory telescopes in the north Chilean desert. It had to be the gravitational effect of a nearby planet.
“The discovery of the potentially habitable planet around Proxima Cen is the culmination of 30 years of work that has improved stellar velocity measurement precision from 300 m/s (metres per second) to 1 m/s”, said one of the researchers, Paul Butler from Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington.
“The first hints of a possible planet were spotted back in 2013, but the detection was not convincing”, explained Anglada-Escude.
Yet in the vastness of space, Proxima b is practically just over the fence, “like your next-door neighbor”, Butler said.
Advertisement
“The lifetime of Proxima is several trillion years, nearly a thousand times longer than the remaining lifetime of the sun”, said Abraham (Avi) Loeb of Harvard University. “Any life on the planet could still be evolving long after our Sun has died”.
