We have a new neighbour! Scientists discover a new planet near our solar system

There may be a new planet in our planet's neighbourhood just four lightyears away. A third planet has been detected orbiting Proxima Centauri, our sun's nearest star neighbour, at a distance of 25 trillion miles (40.2 trillion kilometres).

The red dwarf is just one eighth the mass of the sun and has already been confirmed to have an Earth-sized planet. A second, faraway planet is also possible.

Proxima d, the latest planet to be found, completes one orbit around the star every five Earth days.

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It is one of the lightest exoplanets ever discovered, with a mass of about a quarter of the Earth's. The discovery was described in a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

This planet is only 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometres) from the star, which is less than one-tenth as far as Mercury is from the sun in our solar system. The closest planet to the sun, Mercury orbits it every 88 days.

Proxima b, the first planet discovered in the system, was confirmed in 2020. It orbits the star every 11 days and is about the size of Earth. It is located within the habitable zone, or the distance from a star at which liquid water, the key ingredient for life, can exist on the planet's surface.

Another planet Proxima c is too far from the star to be in a habitable zone, and the newly discovered Proxima d is too nearby to be in the habitable zone.

João Faria, a researcher at Portugal's Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and the lead study author, says the finding indicates that our nearest stellar neighbour contains a wide variety of interesting new worlds that could be explored in the future.

Proxima d was discovered using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Astronomers used the observatory's telescopes and instruments to find and confirm past discoveries of planets in the Proxima Centauri system.

Scientists recently observed a weak signal from a fast orbiting object close to the star during follow-up observations.

ESPRESSO, or the highly sensitive Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations instrument on the VLT, was used to conduct more observations.

The data suggested there was a planet present, and that its gravitational pull was tugging on the star.

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According to Faria, after obtaining new observations, they were able to confirm the signal as a new planet candidate. Detecting a signal so small was an exciting challenge for him, and discovering an exoplanet so close to Earth made it even more exciting.

Proxima d's future observations could confirm that it is in fact the third planet seen orbiting this star. Researchers believe that future observations may reveal even more details about the system, or even additional planets.