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"We were amazed to find a signal in our data. (One AU, the average Earth-sun distance, is about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)īut that planet has not yet been confirmed, so it remains a candidate for now. The signal potentially corresponds to a roughly Neptune-size world orbiting between 1 and 2 astronomical units (AU) from the star, study team members said. The NEAR team upgraded the VLT with several new technologies, including a thermal coronagraph, an instrument designed to block a star's light and allow the heat signatures of orbiting planets to be spotted.Īfter analyzing 100 hours of data gathered by NEAR in May and June of 2019, the scientists detected a thermal fingerprint in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A. NEAR has been searching for planets in the habitable zones of Alpha Cen A and B using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The study presents results from Near Earths in the Alpha Cen Region (NEAR), a $3 million project led by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Breakthrough Watch, a program that hunts for potentially Earth-like worlds around nearby stars. In addition, red dwarfs are prolific flarers, especially when they're young, so it's unclear if their habitable-zone worlds can hold onto their atmospheres for long.
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These stars, the most common in the Milky Way, are small and dim, so their habitable zones lie very close in - so close, in fact, that planets residing there tend to be tidally locked, always showing the same face to their host stars, just as the moon always shows Earth its near side.
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There's considerable debate about the true habitability of Proxima b, however, given that its parent star is a red dwarf. (A second planet, Proxima c, was later discovered circling the star as well, but it orbits farther away, beyond the habitable zone's outer limits.) The planet, known as Proxima b, orbits in the "habitable zone," the range of distances from a star at which liquid water could exist on a world's surface. In 2016, scientists discovered a roughly Earth-size world circling Proxima Centauri, part of the three-star Alpha Centauri system, which lies about 4.37 light-years from Earth.