A team of astronomers has discovered a new planet identical to Earth. Proxima Centauri d is the third planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, which is located 4 light years away from Earth.

According to the Green Severs portal, the discovery This was done using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument and a system of four 8.2-meter telescopes, the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, on the Cerro Paranal mountain in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Hundreds of observations of the Proxima Centauri planetary system were made over a 2-year period.

For these astronomers, Proxima Centauri d is probably smaller than Earth, but not less than 26% of our planet's mass, and may have oceans with water in a liquid state. As João Faria explains in the scientific journal Nature, the total effect of the planet's orbit, which takes only 5 days, is about 40 centimeters per second.

"It is fascinating to learn that our Sun's closest stellar neighbor is host to three small planets," says Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Their proximity makes this a prime system for future studies to understand their nature and how they formed."