Proxima Centauri’s awesome new planet!

The newly found planet for Proxima Centauri, our sun’s nearest neighbor among the stars, is revealed as the closest possible abode for alien life.

The long-sought world … orbits its cool red parent star every 11 days and has a temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface. This rocky world is a little more massive than the Earth and is the closest exoplanet to us — and it may also be the closest possible abode for life outside the solar system.

Wait, you might be saying. Isn’t Alpha Centauri the nearest star besides our sun? Yes, but it’s a triple system. Of the three stars in the system, Proxima – a small red dwarf star – is the closest star. Read about the Alpha Centauri system.

Also, you might have heard reports four years ago of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. Astronomers later learned that – if it existed at all, which it may not – this earlier planet would be too hot to sustain liquid water or life.

ESO described Pale Red Dot, the recent planet search around Proxima Centauri, this way:

During the first half of 2016 Proxima Centauri was regularly observed with the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla in Chile and simultaneously monitored by other telescopes around the world. This was the Pale Red Dot campaign, in which a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé, from Queen Mary University of London, was looking for the tiny back and forth wobble of the star that would be caused by the gravitational pull of a possible orbiting planet.