Proxima d’orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system. (c) ESO/L. Calçada
Proxima d'orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system. (c) ESO/L. Calçada - Thanks to the ESPRESSO spectrograph developed at the University of Geneva, an international team has discovered an ultralight exoplanet in orbit around Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbour. An international team including researchers from the University of Geneva has detected a third candidate planet around our closest neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri. Named Proxima d, this planet is the lightest ever detected with the radial velocity technique. Its mass is about a quarter of that of the Earth. It orbits its star in 5.12 days. The data, of unprecedented precision, were collected using ESPRESSO, the state-of-the-art spectrograph developed by the UNIGE and installed on the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large escope, located in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
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