The nearest exoplanet discovered so far orbits the star Proxima Centauri, located 4.2 light-years from our planet.
Proxima Centauri is only 4.2 light-years away. This is still tens of thousands of years by rocket travel, but only a hop, skip and a jump away in cosmic terms. If there were a star closer than Proxima, we would have found it by now. Without any closer stars, astronomers don’t expect to find any closer planets.
There is always the chance of a rogue planet existing closer than Proxima. Rogue planets are those that escaped their star systems and now travel the galaxy solo. But while astronomers think rogue planets are reasonably common, it’s unlikely one would lurk quite that close.
The research team studied Proxima b using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, or ESPRESSO for short. ESPRESSO is a Swiss spectrograph that is currently mounted on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile. Spectrographs observe objects and split the light coming from those objects into the wavelengths that make it up so that researchers can study the object in closer detail.
Picture Credit : Google