But when pressed, Americans put more overall blame on the way media cover scientific research than on the way researchers publish or share their findings (73% to 24%). adults see significant problems stemming from media practices, researcher practices and the public, themselves. In terms of how these and other scientific research issues get communicated, at least four-in-ten U.S. Public debates over science-related policy issues – such as global climate change, vaccine requirements for children, genetically engineered foods, or developments in human gene editing – place continuous demands on the citizenry to stay abreast of scientific developments. Overall, about a third, 36%, of Americans get science news at least a few times a week, three-in-ten actively seek it out, and a smaller portion, 17%, do both.Īnd while Americans are most likely to get their science news from general news outlets and say the news media overall do a good job covering science, they consider a handful of specialty sources – documentaries, science magazines, and science and technology museums – as more likely to get the science facts right. "This result clearly shows what ESPRESSO is capable of and makes me wonder about what it will be able to find in the future," Faria adds.ĮSPRESSO's search for other worlds will be complemented by ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Atacama Desert, which will be crucial to discovering and studying many more planets around nearby stars.At a time when scientific information is increasingly at the center of public divides, most Americans say they get science news no more than a couple of times per month, and when they do, most say it is by happenstance rather than intentionally, according to a new study by Pew Research Center. "It shows that the radial velocity technique has the potential to unveil a population of light planets, like our own, that are expected to be the most abundant in our galaxy and that can potentially host life as we know it." "This achievement is extremely important," says Pedro Figueira, ESPRESSO instrument scientist at ESO in Chile. The effect of Proxima d's gravity is so small that it only causes Proxima Centauri to move back and forth at around 40 centimetres per second (1.44 kilometres per hour). The technique works by picking up tiny wobbles in the motion of a star created by an orbiting planet's gravitational pull. "I was excited by the challenge of detecting such a small signal and, by doing so, discovering an exoplanet so close to Earth."Īt just a quarter of the mass of Earth, Proxima d is the lightest exoplanet ever measured using the radial velocity technique, surpassing a planet recently discovered in the L 98-59 planetary system. "After obtaining new observations, we were able to confirm this signal as a new planet candidate," Faria says.
As the signal was so weak, the team had to conduct follow-up observations with ESPRESSO to confirm that it was due to a planet, and not simply a result of changes in the star itself. It was during these more recent VLT observations that astronomers spotted the first hints of a signal corresponding to an object with a five-day orbit. The discovery was confirmed in 2020 when scientists observed the Proxima system with a new instrument on ESO's VLT that had greater precision, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO). Proxima b was discovered a few years ago using the HARPS instrument on ESO's 3.6-metre telescope. The star is already known to host two other planets: Proxima b, a planet with a mass comparable to that of Earth that orbits the star every 11 days and is within the habitable zone, and candidate Proxima c, which is on a longer five-year orbit around the star.
It orbits between the star and the habitable zone - the area around a star where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet - and takes just five days to complete one orbit around Proxima Centauri. The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury's distance from the Sun. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun, lying just over four light-years away. "The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration," explains João Faria, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Portugal and lead author of the study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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