Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2016

4 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2016 SPACE CHRONICLES Centauri was regularly observed with the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile and simultaneous- ly monitored by other telescopes around the world. This was the Pale Red Dot campaign, in which a team of astronomers led by Guillem An- glada-Escudé, from Queen Mary University of London, was looking for the tiny back and forth wobble of the star that would be caused by the gravitational pull of a possible orbiting planet. As this was a topic with very wide public interest, the progress of the campaign between mid-January and April 2016 was shared publicly as it happened on the Pale Red Dot website and via so- cial media. The reports were accom- panied by numerous outreach arti- cles written by specialists around An Earth-like planet ar by ESO J ust over four light-years from the Solar System lies a red dwarf star that has been named Proxima Centauri as it is the closest star to Earth apart from the Sun. This cool star in the constellation of Centaurus is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye and lies near to the much brighter pair of stars known as Alpha Centauri AB. Dur- ing the first half of 2016 Proxima