Ten ways ‘Proxima b’ is different from Earth [Starts With A Bang]

“I have lost tolerance for things without meaning. There is no time for them. Does that make sense?” -Sara Seager

The discovery of a potentially habitable planet around the nearest star to our own — Proxima Centauri — has brought up the tantalizing possibility that this might be closest Earth-like world ever found. But it’s important to realize that as much as we’d love to find a world humans could inhabit and colonize beyond our Solar System, there’s a big difference between calling something “Earth-like” and having it actually be like Earth.

While Proxima b and Earth have many things in common, mass, size, flux received from their star, etc., they also have many striking differences. Some of these would be noticeable at day, others at night, and others still would make a habitable world as we recognize it extraordinarily unlikely, or at least very different from the the one we know.

Come learn ten of the ways Proxima b is different than Earth, and see how many you already knew!