Astronomers have confirmed that an Earth-Sized Planet at Proxima Centauri exists
The astronomers have confirmed that an Earth-Sized Planet at Proxima Centauri is present.
Using state-of-the-art astronomical instruments, an international crew of researchers has confirmed the presence of Proxima b, an Earth-like planet that's orbiting the Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Solar System.
Confirming the presence of Proxima b was an important assignment, and it's one of the most interesting planets identified in the neighborhood of our solar system. They found that Proxima b is 1.17 times the mass of Earth, smaller than the older estimate of 1.3 times. It orbits its star in just 11.2 days.
Proxima b was first discovered in 2016 using HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher), a planet-hunting spectrograph attached to one of the telescopes at the European Southern Observatory at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
The scientists honed in on the planet with ESPRESSO, a new generation spectrograph also at the observatory in Chile, which owns three times the accuracy as HARPS. "We were already very happy with the performance of HARPS, which has been responsible for discovering hundreds of exoplanets over the last 17 years," Francesco Pepe, an astronomy professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and leader of ESPRESSO.
There are too some bad news as Proxima Centauri tends to bombard any planets in its proximity with a fierce amount of X-rays - Proxima b receives about 400 times the amount as Earth receives from its Sun. That leads to the question: "Is there an atmosphere that protects the planet from these deadly rays?" asked co-author Christophe Lovis, a researcher who worked on ESPRESSO, in the statement. Lovis believes that the next generation of spectrographs - ESPRESSO's successor, "RISTRETTO," is already in the works - could help us discover the answer.
For us to get a closer and more definite look at Proxima b however, Proxima Centauri is "only" 4.2 light-years from the Sun - meaning it would still take several thousand years to get there using today's propulsion technology.
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