On Wednesday, a team of astronomers announced they had discovered a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri — and that the planet is rocky, has a mass similar to Earth’s and sits in the “goldilocks” zone where liquid water could exist on its surface. Out of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and the many multiples beyond it, one, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, is our closest stellar neighbour. Beginning in 2000, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory, which sits in Chile’s Atacama Desert, collected data that hinted at the presence of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. In 2012, astronomers announced the discovery of a planet orbiting one of the stars in the brighter binary near Proxima. Proxima Centauri b, as the planet is called, sits about seven million kilometres from the star, much closer than infernally-hot Mercury orbits our sun.

Source: thestar August 24, 2016 17:02 UTC