Ten ways ‘Proxima b’ is different than Earth
Because “Earth-like” doesn’t necessarily mean “like our Earth.”
“I have lost tolerance for things without meaning. There is no time for them. Does that make sense?” -Sara Seager
At the end of August, a scientific team from the European Southern Observatory announced the discovery of Proxima b, the first exoplanet ever discovered around Proxima Centauri, the closest star in the Universe to our Sun. Discovered by the radial velocity method, where we can detect the tiny back-and-forth motions induced in the star thanks to the planet’s gravitational pull, we’ve been able to determine both the mass and the orbital period of this planet. Not only is it at the right distance from its star to potentially support liquid water on its surface, but it also has an estimated mass of 1.3 times our own world. If all this is true, it means that it’s only about 10% larger in diameter than our world, that it might have an Earth-like atmosphere, the same raw ingredients and elements as our world, and most excitingly, perhaps even life on the surface.
But despite these incredible similarities and its relatively close distance at just 4.24 light years away, there are some fundamental differences between Proxima b, the closest planet known outside of the Solar System, and our own Earth.
