Astronomers May Have Captured the First Ever Image of Nearby Exoplanet Proxima C - Scientific American

Astronomers May Have Captured the First Ever Image of Nearby Exoplanet Proxima C - Scientific American



The sky around Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri. (Digitized Sky Survey 2, Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani)

Potential picture of Proxima c

It’s far from certain, but astronomers might have captured an image of the exoplanet Proxima c, thought to orbit the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri in our nearest neighbouring planetary system. Researchers analysing data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope identified infrared images that seem to show the planet appearing across several years of routine observations. If genuine, the detection could tell us Proxima c’s size and the angle at which it orbits its star. However, some say it could be the result of random noise in the data — unwanted light from artefacts or background stars.

Scientific American | 7 min readarXiv preprint