On August 24th 2016, a group of astronomers announced that they had discovered a small rocky planet orbiting the the star Proxima Centauri. At 4.2 light years away, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star, is the closest to our own solar system. The astronomers say that the earth like planet is within the star's habitable zone, which is the range of distances that produce temperatures that allow a planet to possess liquid water.
The planet has been named Proxima Centauri b and is believed to be 1.3 times the mass of the Earth. It orbits at a distance of only 4.7 million miles, and it is estimated to take Proxima Centauri b just 11.2 days to orbit its host star. The planet may be tidally locked, which means that it always has the same side facing its sun. It is not known whether Proxima Centauri b has an atmosphere, however, computer models suggest that it does.
Proxima Centauri b was discovered by astronomers working on the Pale Red Dot Project. Michael Endl, one of the authors of a paper published in the journal Nature, said that he began his observations of Proxima Centauri in 2000. Eventually, he and his team found the exo planet by using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS, located at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
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