Nearby Exoplanets Options

[JRehling]

There have been a few topics in recent years pertaining to exoplanets found circling nearby red dwarfs, particularly Proxima Centauri and Trappist-1. There's a new one to report, and I thought I'd give the topic a more general scope rather than specific to this one.

The star in question is Ross 128, and the planet's solar flux is between that of Earth and Venus. There's a good chance that this is potentially the most "habitable" exoplanet yet found, and is happily quite close (13th closest system), so that telescopes will be able to separate the light of the planet from that of the star. This is a circumstance that only a few nearby stars will permit in the foreseeable future, so Ross 128 is likely to figure large in our exoplanet studies over the next century.

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/release...36/eso1736a.pdf

[Hungry4info]

I haven't found access to the paper, but this SciAm article describes one of the candidate planets as a Hot Earth 26 light years away

Check out this paper -- it seems to be the first reference to this candidate at GJ 1151.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1011-9
(Edit: I realize now you must have seen that -- the link is in the article you posted)

It's worth noting that in February, there was a claim of an RV detection of a planet that could explain the radio behaviour of the system, but a later re-analysis seemed to cast doubt on it.

[JRehling]

The Perger, et al paper that finds no evidence for the planet expresses the conclusion in a confusing way, placing upper limits on the minimum mass (eg, if sin i =1). That doesn't place upper limits on the maximum mass (eg, if sin i <1), so if the orbit were more or less face-on, there could be a planet of whatever mass. It's relatively unlikely for a randomly-oriented orbit to have low sin i, but this certainly doesn't rule out a planet with earthlike (or greater) mass that could produce the aforementioned radio emissions.

[dtolman]

3rd planet potentially found around Proxima Centauri by the VLT's ESPRESSO. Orbits at about 1/10 Mercury's distance, and potentially has a mass of .26 earth - the lightest planet ever found using the Radial Velocity method.