After a week of speculation, it’s been confirmed: there is a rocky, possibly Earth-like planet only four light-years from Earth, the closest ever discovered.
On Aug. 16, the German newspaper Der Spiegel quoted an unnamed source from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) who said that they had discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri. Better yet, the planet orbited in the star’s “habitable zone,” an area around a star where liquid water can exist.
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The source also told the newspaper that the observatory would confirm the discovery by the end of August. Until today, no one at the ESO had confirmed or denied the discovery.
Proxima Centauri is a faint star that lies in the constellation Centaurus. It’s actually part of a three-star system that also contains the Alpha Centauri a and Alpha Centauri b.
The search for the exoplanet was done using the ESO’s spectrograph telescope (it uses the breakdown of light), as well as other professional and amateur telescopes from around the world as part of the Pale Red Dot campaign. Astronomers were looking for a wobble in the star. A wobble would indicate that a planet’s gravitational pull was acting upon the star.
“The first hints of a possible planet were spotted back in 2013, but the detection was not convincing,” said Guillem Anglada-Escudé who led the campaign. “Since then we have worked hard to get further observations off the ground with help from ESO and others.”
The investigation discovered that a planet with a mass of about 1.3 Earths was orbiting Proxima Centauri about seven million kilometres away, closer than Mercury orbits the sun.
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Though the planet, Proxima Centauri b, orbits much closer to its host star, it’s still in the habitable zone because the star is much cooler and fainter than our own.
Astronomers estimate that the planet has a temperature that would allow water to exist on its surface, which allows for the possibility of life. However, astronomers will have to continue to investigate in order to confirm.
The findings will be published in the scientific journal Nature.
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