Astronomers Think They Just Discovered Another Earth

“We hit the jackpot here”, said Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astrophysicist at the Queen Mary University of London and lead author of an article on the find in the journal Nature. “The first 10 were promising, the first 20 were consistent with expectations, and at 30 days the result was pretty much definitive”, Anglada-Escudé said.

So, astronomers used the HARPS spectrograph to observe it on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile and also other telescopes around the world.

Since the red dwarf star has a cool surface temperature, it is to dim to be seen with the naked eye. The first signals of a world orbiting Proxima Centauri were recorded more than a decade ago, and more such signals have continued to trickle in – but never enough to be convincing.

“The excitement is that it’s around the closest star to our sun”, says Rory Barnes, also of the University of Washington, adding that it’s “exciting, too, to realize perhaps the next star over has a planet with life on it”. The scientists believe that the planet has surface temperatures that would allow liquid water to form on its surface.

“We will celebrate this important discovery within the Starshot team”.

But a discovery announced today is even bigger: Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an exoplanet that’s close to the size of Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us besides our Sun.

It will be years before that project is a reality.

“You can get to a tenth of the speed of light with present technology”, Guinan notes, pointing out that a trip to this planet would take less than half a century. “This work confirms the Kepler satellite and precision velocity studies that have shown that potentially habitable planets are common, and points the way to the future when such planets will be directly observed with giant ground- and space-based telescopes”.

“The lifetime of Proxima is several trillion years, nearly a thousand times longer than the remaining lifetime of the Sun”, he said.

“A habitable rocky planet around Proxima would be the most natural location to where our civilization could aspire to move after the sun will die, 5 billion years from now”, he said in an email. These factors suggest that the planet could be habitable.

For generations, scientists have imagined other worlds orbiting stars possibly able to sustain life, but they never imagined finding one cosmically in our backyard.