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Does Proxima have Planets?

Stars don't get much more charismatic than Alpha Centauri, as evidenced by the recent announcement of the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot Initiative that aspires to "allow a flyby mission to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years from launch."

Hopefully there'll be a "there" there when the mission barrels through. The current Metaculus odds are running 1 in 3 that a potentially habitable planet will be detected by 2020 in orbit around either Alpha Cen A or Alpha Cen B.

But what about Proxima Centauri? At a distance of 4.25 light years, this binocular-ready red dwarf is currently the closest star to the Sun. It orbits the central Alpha Centauri AB binary with a period of roughly a million years. No planets have been found to orbit it... yet.

The Pale Red Dot consortium has recently used the HARPS instrument to obtain 60 nights of ultra-high precision Doppler radial velocity measurements of Proxima. As explained in detail on the consortium's website, they are following up on a tantalizing Doppler signal that might be due to a terrestrial planet with a mass not dissimilar to Earth's, and an orbital period P>10 days. As of April 1, 2016, they report that their observations are complete, but no news of results has yet emerged.

Prior to Dec. 31, 2017, will a paper appear in the peer-reviewed astronomical literature that announces the detection of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri?

Categories: Physical Sciences – Astrophysics and Cosmology

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Use the community stats to get a better sense of the community consensus (or lack thereof) for this question. Sometimes people have wildly different ideas about the likely outcomes, and sometimes people are in close agreement. There are even times when the community seems very certain of uncertainty, like when everyone agrees that event is only 50% likely to happen.

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