A low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri at a distance of 1.5 AU

Abstract

Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S.Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). ; Our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, hosts a temperate terrestrial planet. We detected in radial velocities evidence of a possible second planet with minimum mass mc sin ic = 5.8 ± 1.9M⊕ and orbital period Pc = 5.21–0.22 +0.26 years. The analysis of photometric data and spectro-scopic activity diagnostics does not explain the signal in terms of a stellar activity cycle, but follow-up is required in the coming years for confirming its planetary origin. We show that the existence of the planet can be ascertained, and its true mass can be determined with high accuracy, by combining Gaia astrometry and radial velocities. Proxima c could become a prime target for follow-up and characterization with next-generation direct imaging instrumentation due to the large maximum angular separation of ~1 arc second from the parent star. The candidate planet represents a challenge for the models of super-Earth formation and evolution. Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved. ; M.D. acknowledges financial support from Progetto Premiale 2015 FRONTIERA funding scheme of the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research. P.G. acknowledges financial support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) under contract 2014-025-R.1.2015 to INAF. D.B. acknowledges financial support from INAF and Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI grant no. 2014-025-R.1.2015) for the 2016 PhD fellowship programme of INAF. H.R.A.J. is supported by UK STFC grant ST/R006598/1. J.S.S. and P.A.P.R. acknowledge support by FONDECYT grant 1161218 and partial support from CONICYT project Basal AFB-170002. M.J.L.-G., N.M., C.R.-L., E.R., G.A., and J.F.G. acknowledge financial support from Spanish MINECO AYA2016-79425-C3-3-P, AYA2017-84390-C2-1-R (co-funded by FEDER), ESP2017-87143R, and ESP2017-87676-C05-02-R and the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award for the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (SEV-2017-0709). G.A.-E. research is funded via grant ST/P000592/1 "Astronomy Research at Queen Mary"granted by the Science and Technology Facilities Council/United Kingdom. ; Peer reviewed