#proxima d

A candidate short-period sub-Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri

Astronomers have discovered a third planet, about twice the size of Mars, orbiting Earth's nearest neighbor.

Alpha Centauri is approximately 4.37 light years from our Sun. It is a trinary star: a system with three stars orbiting each other. The red dwarf Proxima Centauri is the closest of the three stars, approximately 4.2 light years away from us.

Astronomers have previously discovered two other planets orbiting Proxima Centauri: Proxima b, discovered in 2016, and Proxima c, discovered in 2020. The new planet, Proxima d, was first observed in 2020, but it was confirmed-and-formally-published just last week.

Proxima d has only one-fourth the mass of Earth, or around twice the mass of Mars. It is also much closer to Proxima Centauri than Earth is to Sol, completing an orbit in just over five Earth days. Proxima c is about seven times as massive as Earth. It is much further away from its star, taking around 5¼ Earth years to complete a single orbit.

What. An. Awesome. Post, Alia.

Inspired, I wanted to do a sciencey one as well, although I'd planned a, uhm, somwhat mushy (and handwritten) one, but I'm a teensy tinsy bit short on time and sanity so here we are.

Monkeys Choke When Stressed?

We all know what we feel like when we’re in a super stressful situation, whether someone or you is in danger, or you’re in an exam hall, or you’re in the locker room, with the weight of expectations and the desire to win making you wanna freak out, or whether you’re up on the stage, with several eyes on you.

There has, however, been little research regarding animals in high-pressure situations, but a study on monkeys had found some fascinating similarities.

These results from psychologists at Georgia State University in Atlanta are the first evidence that other animals are also affected by stress from pressure to perform.

Basically, monkeys too “choke under pressure”.

Science Daily had also written a great article explaining how the researchers got these results.

Here's a quote from their abstract about their fascinating methodology

"...we trained capuchin monkeys on a computer game that had clearly denoted high- and low-pressure trials, then tested them on trials with the same signals of high pressure, but no difference in task difficulty. Monkeys significantly varied in whether they performed worse or better on high-pressure testing trials and performance improved as monkeys gained experience with performing under pressure. Baseline levels of cortisol were significantly negatively related to performance on high-pressure trials as compared to low-pressure trials. Taken together, this indicates that less experience with pressure may interact with long-term stress to produce choking behavior in early sessions of a task. Our results suggest that performance deficits (or improvements) under pressure are not solely due to human specific factors but are rooted in evolutionarily conserved biological factors."

Espresso isn't just the name of a way of consuming coffee, and you can use it to find new planets

ESPRESSO is also Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations. You know how space research centers love their acronyms.

Using ESPRESSO, we have even discovered a new planet, almost for sure!

Last year, scientists found evidence suggesting that there’s a planet we didn’t know of till now, orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us apart from our ­Sun. Proxima D.

So far, we had only found two other planets around Proxima Centauri and the coolest thing about this new one is that it’s super lightweight; in fact, one of the lighest planets we’ve found outside our solar system.

It’s like, a quarter of the mass of earth.

A team of astronomers had found this evidence using the, and I’m not making this up, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope or ESO's VLT, located in Chile and using our old friend ESPRESSO, with one of its really precise instruments for confirmation of the observations.

This discovery could give us key insight on finding other places that might host life, because it showed that the method they used for finding Proxima D, known as radial velocity technique, can recognize light planets, like the Earth, that our galaxy might very likely be teeming with.

The radial velocity technique basically picks up minute wobbles of stars caused by gravitation pull of planets orbiting it. And since F=ma and our Proxima D is super lightweight, the wobbles were particularly teeny.

Bravo, astronomers! Good job detecting those signals and interpreting them!

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2022/02/aa42337-21/aa42337-21.html

Nieuwe planeet ontdekt bij ster die het dichtst bij de zon staat

Artist’s impression van Proxima d. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada Een team van astronomen dat gebruikmaakt van de Very Large Telescope (VLT) van de Europese Zuidelijke Sterrenwacht (ESO) in Chili heeft bewijs gevonden voor nóg een planeet die om Proxima Centauri draait, de ster die het dichtst bij ons zonnestelsel staat. De kandidaat-planeet is de derde die in het stelsel is gedetecteerd en de lichtste…

Nieuwe planeet ontdekt bij ster die het dichtst bij de zon staat

Artist’s impression van Proxima d. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada Een team van astronomen dat gebruikmaakt van de Very Large Telescope (VLT) van de Europese Zuidelijke Sterrenwacht (ESO) in Chili heeft bewijs gevonden voor nóg een planeet die om Proxima Centauri draait, de ster die het dichtst bij ons zonnestelsel staat. De kandidaat-planeet is de derde die in het stelsel is gedetecteerd en de lichtste…