New York, Europe Breif News – Astronomers have detected a new planet around the star closest to the Sun.
The astorimers found evidence of the body orbiting Proxima Centauri using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile.
The candidate planet is the third detected in the system and is just a quarter of Earth’s mass.
The new discover is the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star.
The star is just over four light-years away from the Sun.
It is also one of the lightest exoplanets – a planet outside the Solar System – ever found, the researchers said.
“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to introduce interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,” a researcher said.
Named Proxima d, the newly discovered planet orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres – less than a 10th of Mercury’s distance from the Sun.
The star is likely to host two other planets.
Proxima b, which orbits the star every 11 days, has a mass comparable to that of Earth. It is within the habitable zone.
Proxima c is on a longer five-year orbit around the star.
During these observations, astronomers spotted the first hints of a signal corresponding to an object with a five-day orbit.
