A terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit around Proxima Centauri

By G. Anglada-Escudé, P. J. Amado, J. Barnes, Z. Berdiñas, R. P. Butler, G. Coleman, I. de la Cueva, S. Dreizler, M. Endl, B. Giesers and 21 more. Nature, 2016

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At a distance of 1.295 parsecs, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri (α Centauri C, GL 551, HIP 70890 or simply Proxima) is the Sun’s closest stellar neighbour and one of the best-studied low-mass stars. It has an effective temperature of only around 3,050 kelvin, a luminosity of 0.15 per cent of that of the Sun, a measured radius of 14 per cent of the radius of the Sun and a mass of about 12 per cent of the mass of the Sun. Although Proxima is considered a moderately active star, its rotation period is about 83 days (ref. 3) and its quiescent activity levels and X-ray luminosity are comparable to those of the Sun. Here we report observations that reveal the presence of a small planet with a minimum mass of about 1.3 Earth masses orbiting Proxima with a period of approximately 11.2 days at a semi-major-axis distance of around 0.05 astronomical units. Its equilibrium temperature is within the range where water could be liquid on its surface.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e8748e4fbc2ffd769b70cd559d6902dd50564d0

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Citations in the corpus

The Detectability and Characterization of the TRAPPIST-1 Exoplanet Atmospheres with JWST (2019, background): “The discovery of Earth-sized planets in temperate orbits around nearby, low-mass stars opens a new door into the era of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheric characterization (BertaThompson et al. 2015; Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016; Gillon et al. 2016, 2017; Dittmann et al. 2017; Luger et al. 2017b).”
Exoplanetary Atmospheres: Key Insights, Challenges, and Prospects (2019, background): “ming facilities. However, a more promising pathway that has emerged in recent years is the atmospheric characterisation of planets orbiting low-mass stars such as TRAPPIST-1 (92) and Proxima Centauri (5). Recent studies show that dedicated spectroscopic observations with JWST could take us within th”
The habitability of Proxima Centauri b. I. Irradiation, rotation and volatile inventory from formation to the present (2016, methodology): “This apparent (minor) disagreement between luminosity, effective temperature and mass may come from the fact that the models of Baraffe et al. (2015) use a solar metallicity while Proxima is more metal rich than the Sun ([Fe/H] = 0.21, Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016).”
Is Proxima Centauri b Habitable? A Study of Atmospheric Loss (2017, background): “First, the study by Anglada-Escudé et al. (2016) concluded that its minimum mass was 1.27M⊕, which yields a minimum radius of around 1.1R⊕ (Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016) assuming a rocky composition akin to that of the Earth, i.e., adopting the empirical relationship R/R⊕ ∼ (M/M⊕) 1/3.”
Stellar and substellar companions of nearby stars from Gaia DR2 (2018, methodology): “It hosts the nearest exoplanet, Proxima b (Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016), a telluric mass planet with a very short orbital period (11.2 d) and orbital distance (0.05 au) that place it inside the habitable zone of its parent star.”
Pale Orange Dots: The Impact of Organic Haze on the Habitability and Detectability of Earthlike Exoplanets (2016, background): “Simulated direct imaging observations Unlike for JWST observations, M dwarf planets hosts are generally poor targets for direct imaging surveys because it will likely not be possible to angularly separate their habitable planets from their host stars except for the closest M dwarfs (e.g. Proxima Cen”
Evolved Climates and Observational Discriminants for the TRAPPIST-1 Planetary System (2018, background): “Several planets that are likely to be terrestrial have been found orbiting Mdwarfs, including within the habitable zone (Berta-Thompson et al. 2015; Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016; Dittmann et al. 2017; Gillon et al. 2017; Shvartzvald et al. 2017).”
How Hospitable Are Space Weather Affected Habitable Zones? The Role of Ion Escape (2017, positive): “Our model provides important constraints on the mass loss of oxygen driven by XUV ﬂ uxes from Proxima Cen from the recently discovered Earth-like planet, Proxima Cen b ( Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016 ) .”
Atmospheric characterization of Proxima b by coupling the Sphere high-contrast imager to the Espresso spectrograph (2016, background): “Indeed, considering a stellar radius of 0.14 R and a stellar rotation period of 83 days (Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016), one obtains an equatorial velocity of only 0.085 km s−1.”
The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars (2016, background): “While the semi-amplitude of Proxima b at 1.4 m s−1 is not especially small (Pepe et al., 2011), it eluded detection for years because of the sparse radial velocity time sampling coupled with the long stellar activity cycle (Anglada-Escudé et al., 2016).”
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs (2018, methodology): “The radial velocity (RV) technique has been successfully applied to detect such companions around M dwarfs given the relatively low mass of these stars (Marcy et al. 1998; Rivera et al. 2005; Udry et al. 2007; Bonfils et al. 2013; Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016).”
Modeling climate diversity, tidal dynamics and the fate of volatiles on TRAPPIST-1 planets (2017, result): “This situation is similar to that of Proxima Cen b (Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016).”
Stellar Flares from the First TESS Data Release: Exploring a New Sample of M Dwarfs (2019, background): “The superflare on 260506296 is comparable to, yet smaller than, the largest superflare reported for Proxima Centauri by Howard et al. (2018).”
The Surface UV Environment on Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Implications for Prebiotic Chemistry and the Need for Experimental Follow-up (2017, background): “Indeed, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system and an Mdwarf, has recently been shown to host a potentially habitable world (Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016), the late M-dwarf TRAPPIST-1 to host three(Gillon et al. 2017), and the nearby M-dwarf LHS 1140 to host another that iswellsuited…”