Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2020

EXOPLANETS 5 JULY-AUGUST 2020 A hypotheti- cal view of the Proxima Centauri system, as it might ap- pear from one of its planets. [IAU/L. Calçada] organized a team of thirty researchers in 2013 to find evidence that established the existence of the planet. The observation campaign conducted by the team was called “Pale Red Dot” and involved the use of ad- vanced instrumentation to follow Proxima Centauri photometrically and spectroscopi- cally. A few years passed before the initia- tive became fully operational. During the I n 2016, the announcement of the discov- ery of an Earth-sized planet around the star closest to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, was a great surprise. The suspicion that this red dwarf was orbited by a planet dates back to at least a decade ago, but there was no physical evidence to prove it. The Catalan astronomer Guillem Anglada- Escudé (Queen Mary University of London)