Scientists found nearest Earth like planet

Scientist and Astronomers have spent many years studying planets outside our solar system. We are always asking the question “Are we alone?”. We might be close to answering that question. Scientist found an Earth like planet orbiting in a start within the “goldilocks” zone.

Proxima Centauri b (AKA Proxima b) is an exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri which is the closest star from our sun. Although it is the closest star, it is still 4.2 light years away or approximately 40 trillion kilometers. In case you don’t remember, light years is the distance traveled by light in 1 year. This means that if you are travelling at light speed(300,000 km/s), you will reach this planet in 4.2 years. Light speed it impossible to achieve as of this moment so we can’t visit this planet in the near future unless the scientist will have a breakthrough on space travel technology. Albeit one tenth of light speed is still impossible.

This planet orbits a 4.85 billion years old red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri b is close enough to its star that it might be tidally locked where one side is permanently facing the star and the other side is permanently in a total darkness. The side that faces its star will be hot and may not be habitable and the other side will be freezing cold. However, between these two extreme areas, there would be a region along the terminator line where the liquid water can exist and temperature is just fine.

Most exoplanets are discovered using a method called “Doppler spectroscopy” also known as (radial-velocity method). This is measuring the movement of stars. An orbiting planet on the star can cause its orbit to wobble. Therefore we can conclude that there is a planet orbiting a star if the star wobbles. This is an indirect way to detect planets because at this enormous distance even the most powerful telescope can’t see the planet.