Astronomers have found evidence of a third planet orbiting just four light-years away from us. The possible planet is orbiting Proxima Centauri, our sun’s closest stellar neighbour, about 40 trillion kilometres away. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year in a vacuum and is equivalent to roughly 9.5 trillion kilometres.
The planet has a mass of about a quarter of Earth’s and can be considered one of the lightest exoplanets ever found. A study with details of the discovery was published on Thursday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The potential planet orbits a small, dim red dwarf star just an eighth of the sun’s mass.
In that solar system, astronomers have already confirmed one Earth-sized planet and possibly a second. The most recent planet discovered, called Proxima d, completes an orbit around its star every five Earth days. It is also only about 4 million kilometres from the star, which is less than a tenth of the distance between Mercury and the sun in our solar system.
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