Proximate goals

WE'VE been wondering what planet we're first going to look for life on. Now we know.' Rory Barnes, of the University of Washington, puts it nicely. Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the sun, has a planet. That planet weighs not much more than Earth and is therefore presumably rocky. And it orbits within its parent star's habitable zone'meaning that, given an atmosphere, its surface temperature is likely to permit liquid water.A prize discovery, then, for astrobiologists such as Dr Barnes. The discoverers themselves are a transnational team of astronomers who have been using telescopes at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in the Atacama desert, in Chile, for planet-hunting. Though they have not seen the new planet directly (they have inferred its existence from its effect on its parent star's light'see box on next page), their paper in Nature describes what they have been able to deduce about it.Proxima Centauri b, as it is known, probably weighs between 1.3 and three times as much as Earth and orbits its parent star once every 11 days. This puts its distance from Proxima Centauri...Continue reading
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