The funny thing about the discovery of Proxima b — the closest planet to our solar system, which is also rocky, Earth-size, and potentially habitable — is that nobody has actually seen it.
Astronomers know it exists because they've seen its gravity tug on and "wiggle" Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star that it orbits.
But no telescopes in space or on the ground, nor any in serious stages of planning, can directly photograph Proxima b.
It's very distant at 4.2 light-years away from us. Also, its "year" lasts only 11.2 days — an orbit too tight to pick out a planet from the blinding glare of a star.
However, a photograph isn't necessary to ask the most important question about Proxima b, a world that Scientific American has (optimistically) deemed "the Earth next door": Does it have an atmosphere, or is it an airless, barren wasteland like the Moon?
Two researchers at Harvard believe that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2018, could get the job done in record time, and by merely sampling the star system's light.
"It would only take [11 days'] worth of observing time," Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, told Business Insider.
"With the light we detect, we can ask if this world looks like a bare rock. If it doesn't, there might be an atmosphere, and there might also be an ocean, which life requires," says Loeb, who co-authored a pre-print study on arXiv with Laura Kreidberg, a Harvard astronomer who studies exoplanet atmospheres.
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http://www.isn-news.net/2016/09/the-earth-next-door-may-have-cozy.html