NASAs Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 2,300 exoplanets to date by studying how a stars light dims when a planet passes in front of it as viewed by the spacecraft.
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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.
The newly discovered planet has been temporarily named Proxima B by its discoverers, an worldwide team led by astronomer Guillem Anglada-Escudé at Queen Mary University in London.
Despite being so close, we will need significant improvements to enable interstellar travel.
Scientists have long studied Proxima Centauri, the new planet’s star. It only takes 11 earth days to make one revolution – a.k.a one year.
“Proxima b would probably be the first exoplanet visited by a probe made by humans”, co-author Julien Morin, an astrophysicist at France’s University of Montpellier, told AFP.
Dr Mikko Tuomi, from the centre for astrophysical research at the University of Hertfordshire, said: “According to the findings the planet has a rocky surface and is only a fraction more massive than the Earth”.
The planet, Proxima B, is 1.3 times bigger than ours and orbits inside the habitable zone, which means there’s a good chance there could be water and ice.
At regular intervals, Proxima Centauri is approaching Earth at about 5 kilometres per hour and at opposite times in those cycles it is receding at the same speed.
It is said the newly discovered exoplanet is just 4.2 light-years away from our solar system.
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An artist’s impression of what the surface of the planet Proxima b might look like. “This work has resulted in the discovery of hundreds of planets around the nearest stars, and now a potentially habitable planet around the nearest star in the sky”. Some researchers believe that this might prevent the existence of an atmosphere, but again we’re only speculating. It’s far closer to its star than we are (five million miles compared to 93 million miles), but its star is very different, and much weaker, than our sun. The star itself is a red dwarf, around 12 percent of the mass of our sun, and an effective temperature of only around 3,050.
