{"id":135456,"date":"2022-02-10T15:22:18","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T23:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/new-planet-detected-around-closest-star"},"modified":"2022-02-10T15:22:18","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T23:22:18","slug":"new-planet-detected-around-closest-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/new-planet-detected-around-closest-star","title":{"rendered":"New planet detected around closest star"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-planet-detected-around-closest-star.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of Earth\u2019s mass, the planet is also one of the lightest exoplanets ever found.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,\u201d said Jo\u00e3o Faria, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Portugal, lead author of a study published today in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aanda.org\/articles\/aa\/full_html\/2022\/02\/aa42337-21\/aa42337-21.html\" target=\"_blank\">Astronomy and Astrophysics<\/a>. Proxima Centauri is a small, M-class star, lying just 4.2 light years away.<\/p>\n<p>The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury\u2019s distance from the Sun. It lies between the star and the habitable zone \u2013 the band where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet \u2013 and takes just five days to complete one orbit around its star.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":566,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}