Just discovered possible livable planet orbits in 11 days around parent star – Focus on News

Thursday, 25. August 2016 – 11:41 Update: 26-08-2016 8:33

‘This long-sought world, which has been named Proxima b running in 11 days around his cool red parent star, and has a temperature where liquid water is possible on the surface. The rocky world is slightly heavier than the Earth, “said ESO. It is the nearest extrasolar planet and it can also be the nearest residence for life outside our solar system. The article describing this discovery, is today in the journal Nature.

4 light years

At a distance of just over four light years from our solar system is a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri. It’s the name proxima (near) gives it away, the nearest star as seen from Earth if we do not count the sun. This cool star is too faint to see with the naked eye in the southern constellation Centaur and is overshadowed by the bright double star Alpha Centauri AB.

In the first half of 2016 Proxima Centauri was regularly studied with HARPS -spectrograaf on the ESO 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla in Chile. At the same time the applicant was being watched by other telescopes in the world. This happened during the so-called Pale Red Dot campaign.

A team led by Guillem Anglada Queen Mary University of London, looked or the star showed tiny fluctuations. These fluctuations may be caused by the gravity of a possible planet orbiting the star.

The campaign’s progress was shared between mid-January and April 2016 with the public on the Pale Red Dot website through social media. Besides the results also appeared numerous popular science articles written by specialists from all over the world.

First indications already in 2013.

Guillem Anglada-Escudé explains the background of the unique quest, “the first indications of a possible planet emerged already in 2013, but when the observations were not convincing enough. Since then, we have worked hard to make with the help of ESO and others more observations. We started about two years ago to plan the Pale Red Dot Campaign

The Pale Red Dot data, combined with previous observations from ESO and other observatories, revealed a clear signal:. Sometimes Proxima Centauri is about 5 kilometers per hour towards the earth and sometimes he moves away with the same speed. This regular pattern of changing radial velocity repeats every 11.2 days.

Accurate analysis of the resulting small Doppler shifts indicate the presence of a planet having at least 1.3 times the mass of the earth, which rotates around Proxima Centauri at a distance of approximately 7 million kilometers and that is only 5% of the distance from the earth to the sun.