Last week we published an article about a suspected planet orbiting the nearest star to the sun, a little old red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. My personal favorite name suggested for the probable planet so far is Centurion. Other names being used are Proxima B and Planet P. Anyway, it turns out we made some lucky guesses:
Proxima b orbits its parent star every 11 days. Because of the method used to detect it, we don't actually know how massive the planet candidate is — but we can say with confidence that it's at least 1.3 times as massive as the Earth. It's just over 4 million miles away from its cool, tiny red dwarf of a star (much closer than we are to our own sun), so it is blasted with enough radiation to maintain a balmy surface temperature of around minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
I love that image produced by the ESO and artist M. Kornmesser. And I’m no doubt biased, but I liked the image done by Karen Werhstein and DemFromCT for our piece even more, in part because it was more dynamic. It had more going on, it showed the characteristic of the planet’s weather and geology, and that’s exactly what we intended.
Police say that Burrows sent harassing messages to numerous people at that point, including the management at the victim's apartment complex and her ex-husband. He also allegedly attempted to access the victim's Facebook account. Police say he also sent a suspicious package to her apartment that contained a live snake and a threatening note.
The planet might be locked in its orbit around its star in such a way that one side always faces that star. That would be bad for an atmosphere and for life. We don’t know if it has an atmosphere, or water. What we do know is that if water is on the surface, it might be liquid, and if an atmosphere ever formed there, maybe (though this is highly debatable) it did not necessarily get blown away into space or otherwise destroyed.
- I’ve placed a Youtube video produced by Nature about the planet below the fold!