Astronomers Announce Proxima Centauri’s Second Planet, And It’s Perfect For Direct Imaging
The closest star to our own doesn’t just host one rocky planet, but a second, larger ‘super-Earth’ much farther out.
Of all the stars in the Universe, the closest one to our own Solar System is Proxima Centauri: a red dwarf star just 4.2 light-years away. Smaller, dimmer and fainter than our own Sun, this star has all the wrong characteristics to support life on any of the planets that might orbit it. Despite observing this star for more than a century, no transits — where an intervening planet periodically blocks a portion of the parent star’s light — have ever been seen.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t planets orbiting it; it just means we need to use a different technique to find them. In 2016, scientists announced the discovery of Proxima b, a 1.3 Earth mass planet that revolves around Proxima Centauri every 11 days. With an additional four years of data, a new team has come forward to announce a second planet, Proxima c, weighing about 6 Earth masses and taking around 5 years to complete an orbit. It’s the first super-Earth ever found this close to us, and might become the first one of all to ever be directly imaged. Here’s the story of Proxima c.
