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Before the discovery of Proxima Centauri b, the TV documentary Alien Worlds hypothesized that a life-sustaining planet could exist in orbit around Proxima Centauri or other red dwarfs. Such a planet would lie within the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, about 0.023–0.054 AU (3.4–8.1 million km) from the star, and would have an orbital ...
Proxima Centauri b is the closest exoplanet to Earth, [19] at a distance of about 4.2 ly (1.3 parsecs). [4] It orbits Proxima Centauri every 11.186 Earth days at a distance of about 0.049 AU, [1] over 20 times closer to Proxima Centauri than Earth is to the Sun. [20] As of 2021, it is unclear whether it has an eccentricity [e] [23] but Proxima Centauri b is unlikely to have any obliquity. [24]
Proxima d is a sub-Earth at least one-quarter of the mass of Earth (or twice the mass of Mars), orbiting at roughly 0.029 AU (4.3 million km; 2.7 million mi) every 5.1 days. [4] It is the least massive and innermost known planet of the Proxima Centauri system.
Though not visible to the naked eye, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun at a distance of 4.24 ly (1.30 pc), slightly closer than α Centauri AB. Currently, the distance between Proxima Centauri and α Centauri AB is about 13,000 AU (0.21 ly), [17] equivalent to about 430 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.
The closest exoplanets are those found orbiting the star closest to the Solar System, which is Proxima Centauri 4.25 light-years away. The first confirmed exoplanet discovered in the Proxima Centauri system was Proxima Centauri b, in 2016. HD 219134 (21.6 ly) has six exoplanets, the highest number discovered for any star within this range.
The stars with the most confirmed planets are the Sun (the Solar System's star) and Kepler-90, with 8 confirmed planets each, followed by TRAPPIST-1 with 7 planets. The 1,033 multiplanetary systems are listed below according to the star's distance from Earth. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System, has three planets (b, c and d).
The planet was first reported by Italian astrophysicist Mario Damasso and his colleagues in April 2019. Damasso's team had noticed minor movements of Proxima Centauri in the radial velocity data from the ESO's HARPS instrument, analyzed earlier by Ukrainian astrophysicist Yakiv Pavlenko and his colleages at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, [7] [8] [9] indicating a possible second ...
Called Proxima b, the planet is 1.3 times the mass of Earth and has an orbital period of roughly 11.2 Earth days. [10] However, Proxima Centauri's classification as a red dwarf casts doubts on the habitability of any exoplanets in its orbit due to low stellar flux, high probability of tidal locking, small circumstellar habitable zones and high ...