A THIRD Planet Found Orbiting Nearby Proxima Centauri - Universe Today universetoday storybywill
. In addition to confirming the existence of Proxima b, astronomers spotted the first hints of a signal corresponding to an object with a five-day orbit.
Since the signal was so weak, the team had to conduct follow-up observations with ESPRESSO to confirm that it was due to a planet. Similar to Proxima b and c, the planet was confirmed using the Radial Velocity Method, where slight changes in a star’s position indicate the possible presence of planets.
According to their results, Proxima d has a minimum mass of 0.26 Earth masses , making it the lightest exoplanet ever measured using the Radial Velocity Method. Because Proxima b is so light, its gravitational influence is so small that it only causes Proxima Centauri to move back and forth at around 40 cm per second . They also confirmed that it orbits its star at a distance of about 0.029 AU – 4 million km; 2,485,485 mi – or less than a tenth of Mercury’s distance from the Sun.
The ESPRESSO instruments collects light from all four 8.2 m telescopes of the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Credit: ESO/L. Calcada The Proxima Centauri star system consists of three confirmed exoplanets, with orbital periods of five days , eleven days , and five years . As Pedro Figueira, an ESPRESSO instrument scientist at ESO in Chile,
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