Does an Earth-Like Alien Planet Orbit the Sun's Closest Neighbor?

[DFighter]

Hubble Space Telescope image of the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, which lies just 4.25 light-years from the sun.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
 

Astronomers have found a rocky and possibly Earth-like planet circling the star closest to the sun, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel.

On Friday (Aug. 12), Der Spiegel reported that the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile had spotted evidence of a rocky, potentially habitable world orbiting Proxima Centauri, a small, dim star that lies just 4.25 light-years from the sun.

Scientists with the ESO will announce the find later this month, according to Der Spiegel, which cited an unnamed astrophysicist on the discovery team as its source. [in Images: The 1st Earth-Size Alien Planets Ever Found]

 

ESO officials neither confirmed nor denied the report.

"We were surprised to see the article in Der Spiegel and do not know the source," ESO spokesman Richard Hook told Space.com via email. "ESO has no further comment to make at present."

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, a star much smaller and cooler than the sun. About three-quarters of all stars in the Milky Way galaxy are red dwarfs.

 

Proxima Centauri lies just 0.24 light-years from the two stars of Alpha Centauri, and many astronomers regard the red dwarf as part of the latter system.

In 2012, astronomers announced that La Silla's High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher instrument, or HARPS, had spotted a rocky, roughly Earth-size planet around Alpha Centauri B. This world, known as Alpha Centauri Bb, circles its host star once every 3.2 days, and is therefore much too hot to support life, discovery team members said at the time.

However, a 2015 study found that the detected signal of Alpha Centauri Bb was merely an artifact and that the planet almost certainly does not exist.

To date, astronomers have discovered more than 3,200 confirmed alien planets, with NASA's Kepler space telescope responsible for about two-thirds of the finds. Kepler's work suggests that, on average, every star in the Milky Way hosts at least one planet.

Source + video: http://www.space.com/33751-earth-like-planet-proxima-centauri.html

[Flible]

I read something about that guy some 10 months ago, or something. Wasn't the AU off balance for it to have a habitable temperature?

[DFighter]

I honestly wouldn't know it I am not so long news reporter and only started to read these topics since some weeks
but in anycase its still over 4 lightyears away this system and just imagen this
voyager 1 probe has started it's journey in 1977 so next year that will be 40 years and it only travelled 0.00187 lightyear so lets round this up 0.002 lightyear in 40 years time imagen how long 4.25 light year will take