Potentially habitable exoplanet spotted around Alpha Centauri A in Earth’s backyard
The nearest solar system to our own may actually host two potentially life-supporting planets, a new study reports.
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In 2016, scientists discovered a roughly Earth-size world circling Proxima Centauri, part of the three-star Alpha Centauri system, which lies about 4.37 light-years from Earth.
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The planet, known as Proxima b, orbits in the “habitable zone,” the range of distances from a star at which liquid water could exist on a world’s surface.
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There’s considerable debate about the true habitability of Proxima b, however, given that its parent star is a red dwarf. These stars, the most common in the Milky Way, are small and dim, so their habitable zones lie very close in — so close,
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in fact, that planets residing there tend to be tidally locked, always showing the same face to their host stars, just as the moon always shows Earth its near side.
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The other two stars in the Alpha Centauri trio, however, are sunlike — a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, which together make up a binary orbiting the same center of mass. And Alpha Centauri A may have its own habitable-zone planet, according to the new research,
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The study presents results from Near Earths in the Alpha Cen Region (NEAR), a $3 million project led by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Breakthrough Watch, a program that hunts for potentially Earth-like worlds around nearby stars.