“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbor seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,” João Faria, lead researcher and astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Portugal.
A third planet has been detected orbiting our closest stellar neighbor Proxima Centauri in the Alpha Centauri solar system [1]. The Alpha Centauri system, at only 4.3 light years from Earth, is turning out to be a rich and diverse solar system: with an Earth-like planet named Proxima b that orbits in the habitable zone around the low-mass M dwarf star Proxima B— which we discussed in the RSF article ‘Potential Habitability of Exoplanets’ [2]— candidate planet Proxima c which has a much larger orbit outside of the habitable zone, and now Proxima d, with a mass about a quarter of that of...
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