An international team of scientists has just confirmed that near Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us (outside the Sun), a planet the size of the Earth orbits. Scientists published the results of their research in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Proxima b is a planet with a mass of 1.17 Earth mass, located in the ecosphere of its star and orbiting it in 11.2 days.
This groundbreaking discovery was made possible by precise measurements of the radial speed of the star made with the Swiss ESPRESSO spectrograph, which is currently the most precise instrument of its kind in the world. ESPRESSO is installed on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
Proxima b was first discovered using an older HARPS spectrograph that suggested the possibility of a planet near the star.
ESPRESSO has now measured the radial velocity of the Proxima Centauri star a little more than 4 light years away from Earth with an accuracy of 30 cm / s. That is three times more accurate than measurements made using HARPS.
We were already very pleased with the results obtained using the HARPS instrument, which has discovered hundreds of exoplanets over the past 17 years - says astronomy professor Francesco Pepe, leader of the ESPRESSO team. We are glad that ESPRESSO could confirm the discovery by making even more accurate measurements.
The main author of the article Alejandro Suarez Mascareno admits that confirming the existence of Proxima b was an extremely important task, because due to its proximity to Earth, it is one of the most interesting planets for us.
Measurements made using ESPRESSO have determined that the minimum mass of the planet is 1.17 masses of the Earth and that it orbits the star in just 11.2 days.
ESPRESSO made it possible to measure the mass of the planet with an accuracy of one tenth of the mass of the Earth. It's unbelievable - says Michel Mayor, Nobel Prize winner in physics in 2019 and the architect of all ESPRESSO instruments.
Is it still life on Proxime b?
Although Proxima b's distance from its host star is twenty times smaller than the Sun-Earth distance, the planet receives about the same amount of energy from it, so the temperature on the planet's surface may allow liquid water to exist. Of course if any water is there.
So far, one cannot say that any life may have developed on the planet's surface. Proxima Centauri is an active red dwarf that bombards the planet's surface with strong X-rays, which reaches the surface 400 times more than to Earth.
Is the planet surrounded by an atmosphere that is able to protect the surface from this radiation? And if such an atmosphere exists, does it contain chemical elements conducive to the creation of life (e.g. oxygen)? How long have such conditions been there? We will try to answer these questions using a RISTRETTO spectrometer, which we will build especially for the analysis of radiation emitted by Proxima b, and using the HIRES instrument, which will be installed on the giant ELT telescope currently under construction (mirror diameter 39 m) - says Christophe Lovis, researcher from Faculty of Astronomy at UNIGE.
That's certain! There is a planet the size of the Earth next to the star nearest us
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