Astronomers have discovered a new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Earth’s solar system, called Proxima D.
Proxima D has a mass of less than a quarter of the mass of Earth, and is one of the lightest in the group of about 5,000 exoplanets orbiting stars other than the Sun.
The star Proxima Centauri is located 4 light-years away from the Sun, which is much smaller and twice as cool as it, and belongs to the class of stars called “red dwarfs”.
And Baptiste Lavie from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva and a member of the telescope team of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, expected that the discovered planet would be “rocky, and its mass is too low to hold gas”, as do the giant gas planets in the solar system such as Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune.