This Earth-like planet that was recently discovered could support life

An worldwide team of scientists say changes in the color of the light coming from the planet’s host star suggests Proxima b is a little bigger than Earth – and much closer to its star than we are to the Sun.

“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.

Efforts to send some type of man-made probe to the Alpha Centauri system may have gotten a huge boost Tuesday as the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the existence of a planet around Proxima Centauri that could potentially harbor (or support) life.

“The spectacular finding about this of course is that this system is so close to our Earth and solar system”, said Angsgar Reiners, a German scientist who is among the research’s co-authors.

Despite the temperate orbit of Proxima b, the conditions on the surface may be strongly affected by the ultraviolet and x-ray flares from the star – far more intense than the Earth experiences from the Sun, the researchers said.

“There’s no reason to know whether or not there is life there, but the fact that the planet exists and is in the zone where liquid water might exist on the surface is very exciting”.

The star is like our own Sun, only 1,000 dimmer; however, the Proxima is also closer to the star than Earth is to the Sun.

Since 2009, 3,000 exoplanets have already been discovered including the first one that was found in 2014. We could then observe if there is any life on Promixa B and what kind, or if there’s anything on the surface at all. Without an atmosphere, it could be -22 to -40 degrees Fahrenheit. If a small, unmanned spacecraft were launched in the next few years, it could reach Proxima b by 2100; children living in 2016 would be alive to see the craft’s arrival. That’s because a telescope in Chile that was used to look at Proxima every night for 60 days found a gravitational effect on its star every 11 days or so.

The relative proximity of the planet gives scientists a better chance to eventually capture an image of it, to help them establish whether it has an atmosphere and water, Reuters reported.