Shifts in starlight from Proxima Centauri reveal its third planet — a world orbiting within the star’s habitable zone.
Astronomer João Faria and his collaborators detected Proxima Centauri d by measuring tiny shifts in the spectrum of the star’s light as the planet’s gravity pulled it during orbit. The team used a state-of-the art spectrograph called ESPRESSO at the Very Large Telescope, a system of four 8.2-metre telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile.
ESPRESSO was built mainly to search for extrasolar planets, as well as to study light from extremely bright but distant objects called quasars. The most exciting thing about the latest discovery is that it shows the instrument works as advertised, says Anglada-Escudé. “ESPRESSO is the new instrument which everyone wants to use and play with,” he says.
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