Proxima b – Astronomy Now

A very, very bad day for Earth’s nearest exoplanet neighbour

27 February 2018 Astronomy Now

Proxima b, the nearest exoplanet to Earth, was blasted by a tremendous solar flare last March, an outburst that bathed the world in 4,000 times the amount of radiation Earth receives from a major flare.

Breakthrough Listen searches new-found nearby planet Proxima b for signs of ET

8 November 2016 Astronomy Now

Breakthrough Listen, the 10-year, $100-million astronomical search for intelligent life beyond Earth launched in 2015 by Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, has just announced its first observations of newly-discovered Earth-size planet Proxima b orbiting the nearest star to the Sun using the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Oldest known planet-forming circumstellar disc discovered

22 October 2016 Astronomy Now

A group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers joined forces to discover an unusual hunting ground for exoplanets. They found a red dwarf, called AWI0005x3s, surrounded by the oldest known circumstellar disc — a 45-million-year-old primordial ring of gas and dust orbiting the star from which planets can form.

Proxima Centauri might be more Sun-like than we thought

11 October 2016 Astronomy Now

Astronomers recently announced that the nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet in its habitable zone. Proxima Centauri is a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the Sun. However, new research shows that it is Sun-like in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots.

Potentially-habitable planet discovered around nearest star Proxima Centauri

24 August 2016 Keith Cooper

A planet with at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth has been discovered orbiting within the habitable zone of the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light years away.