Explore the 10 nearest stars | Astronomy.com astronomy.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from astronomy.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
EarthSky | 3rd possible planet found orbiting nearest star earthsky.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from earthsky.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
At just over four light years distant, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun in the entire Universe. We know it has one planet, called Proxima b, and there's decent evidence of a second, called Proxima c.
A team of astronomers has announced there might be a third planet, now too! If confirmed it will be called Proxima d, and would be one of the smallest and lowest-mass exoplanets ever found.
Yeah, this may be a big deal.
Scientific American also has a good synopsis). The work on analysis has not yet been published in the scientific journals, though papers are expected to come out soon, so we don't have the whole story yet. I am in general reluctant to report on non-published data, but given that this news is out there, I think it's important to give people the background.
The signal was detected as part of a set of observations of the star Proxima Centauri (usually just called Proxima) in the summer of 2019. It was being done as part of Breakthrough Listen, an initiative to observe the nearest one million stars to our Sun using radio telescopes across the world to look for signals of alien intelligence.