Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2022

28 MARCH-APRIL 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING A comparison between the angu- lar dimension of Proxima Cen- tauri as seen from Proxima b and that of the Sun as seen from the Earth. Proxima Centauri is much smaller than the Sun, but Proxima b is very close to its star. [ESO/G. Coleman] front of stars relatively close to the Sun. Of about 200,000 targets, TESS has collected high-precision photo- metric data with a cadence of two minutes in both periods considered, as well as with the new cadence mode of just 20 seconds in the most recent period. Despite such intense photometry, it could still be difficult to correctly interpret the evolution of Proxima Centauri flares and iso- late signals potentially attributable to planetary transits. Additionally, James Davenport (University of Washington’s Department of As- tronomy) and colleagues had sug- gested in 2016 that the star’s light curve could even be dominated by the superposition of numerous flares of varying energies, a scenario that would make it almost impossi- ble to extract the very weak signal of a transit from the noise despite D ax Feliz, the researcher who, with his team, has shown that there are no transiting planets around Proxima Centauri capable of reducing its brightness by more than five thousandths of a magnitude. [Vanderbilt University] E mily Gilbert is the author of one of the most recent and most accurate Proxima Centauri photometry studies. With her team, she established that, around the closest star to the Solar System, there are no transiting plan- ets with a diameter larger than 40% of Earth’s. [University of Chicago] of observations. The task of TESS is to observe the whole sky in the visi- ble and near-infrared to discover planets with frequent transits in