A third planet has been detected around the closest star to our Solar System, Proxima Centauri.
The exoplanet was found by astronomers using theEuropean Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile.
Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our Sun, located at a distance of about 4 lightyears from our Solar System.
The candidate exoplanet, known as 'Proxima d', is the third planet detected orbiting the star and is also the lightest yet discovered around Proxima Centauri.
Proxima d: what we know so far
Proxima d is just a quarter the mass of Earth, making it one of the lightest exoplanets ever found.
It orbits about 4 million kilometres from Proxima Centauri, which is less than a tenth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun in our own Solar System.
This puts its orbit in a region between the star and the habitable zone, which is the region around a star where liquid water can pool on the surface (a precursor for life as we know it).
Proxima d takes 5 days to complete one orbit around Proxima Centauri.
It was discovered using an exoplanet detection method known as radial velocity, whereby astronomers observe wobbles in the motion of a star caused by the planet's gravitational pull tugging on the star as it orbits.
But Proxima d is so light that its gravity causes Proxima Centauri to move back and forth just 40cm per second.
“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,” says João Faria, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Portugal and lead author of the study
The discovery brings the total number of known exoplanets around Proxima Centauri to 3, including Proxima b, which has a mass similar to Earth and which orbits the star every 11 days within the habitable zone.
Candidate exoplanet Proxima c takes 5 years to orbit the star.
Proxima b was discovered in 2016 using the HARPS instrument on ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope.
Then in 2020, astronomers carrying out follow-up investigations observed Proxima Centauri using the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument on the Very Large Telescope.
During these observations, the team discovered evidence of a third exoplanet with a 5-day orbit.Further analysis revealed it to be a newly-discovered world: Proxima d.
"After obtaining new observations, we were able to confirm this signal as a new planet candidate," Faria says.
"I was excited by the challenge of detecting such a small signal and, by doing so, discovering an exoplanet so close to Earth."
The full study is available to read via Astronomy & Astrophysics at www.aanda.org.
