Astronomers detect new planet near Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system
Astronomers have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of Earth's mass, the planet is also one of the lightest exoplanets ever found. The findings of the research were published in the journal 'Astronomy and Astrophysics'.
A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System.
"The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration," explained Joao Faria, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica e Ciencias do Espaco, Portugal and lead author of the study. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun, lying just over four light-years away.
The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury's distance from the Sun. It orbits between the star and the habitable zone -- the area around a star where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet -- and takes just five days to complete one orbit around Proxima Centauri.
The star is already known to host two other planets: Proxima b, a planet with a mass comparable to that of Earth that orbits the star every 11 days and is within the habitable zone, and candidate Proxima c, which is on a longer five-year orbit around the star.
Proxima b was discovered a few years ago using the HARPS instrument on ESO's 3.6-metre telescope. The discovery was
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