Astronomers using ESO telescopes and other facilities have found clear evidence of a planet orbiting the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri. The long-sought world, designated Proxima b, orbits its cool red parent star every 11 days and has a temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface. This rocky world is a little more massive than the Earth and is the closest exoplanet to us — and it may also be the closest possible abode for life outside the Solar System. A paper describing this milestone finding will be published in the journal Nature on 25 August 2016.
The release, images and videos are available on:
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1629/
Space Scoop - the children's version of this release is available at: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1629/kids/
Kind regards,
The ESO Education and Public Outreach Department
24 August 2016
|
24 August 2016: This is the ESOcast that no viewer will want to miss. We discuss the result of the quest to find a planet around the closest star to the Solar System ...
|
| Read more |
|
23 August 2016: ESO has signed an agreement with a consortium led by the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) [1] to build 4MOST, a unique, next-generation spectroscopic instrument which will be mounted on ...
|
| Read more |
|
23 August 2016: A record amount of observing time was requested by the international astronomy community under the call for proposals as part of Cycle 4 at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array ...
|
| Read more |
|
|
|
|
