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There are many exoplanets but they are far away so the announcement in 2016 that the closest star to Earth, Next Centauri, housed a planet was welcomed with great enthusiasm.

Next b, as this world was baptized, it was still too far away to send a spacecraft to explore it but four light years is a distance that perhaps in the future may travel space vehicles manufactured with technologies that do not yet exist, such as those shuffling in the Breakthrough Starshot project to send tiny ships to that solar system.

Subsequent studies have cooled hopes that the closest exoplanet to Earth can host some kind of life, but there seem to be other possibilities. And it is that everything indicates that our neighboring star has at least another planet.

In 2017, a belt of material was discovered around the Next Centauri star that suggested that the Exoplanet Next b was not alone. And this Wednesday, a team of scientists in which Spanish researchers participate provides new evidence on the probable existence of that second world that would orbit the star closest to the Sun.

They call it Next c and as the authors of the study in the journal Science Advances explain, they believe that it is a super-earth whose mass would be greater than that of the Earth but much lower than that of solar system giants such as Uranus and Neptune.

If their existence is confirmed, something they hope to do with future observations made by Gaia , the probe of the European Space Agency that scans our galaxy to make a census of stars, they will obtain information on how low-mass planets form around stars of Low mass like Next Centauri. It is a red dwarf with a mass eight times lower than that of the Sun.

Data collected for 17 years

To carry out this study, the scientists used data collected for 17 years with the telescopes that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has in Chile. These observations revealed the presence of a signal with a period of 5, 2 years that is compatible with the existence of a second exoplanet around Next Centauri.

Pedro J. Amado, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) and co-author of the study, sees that this neighboring star can house even more planets, in addition to Proxima by the possible Proxima c: "The ability to detect them is only limited for the technique we use and the accuracy that our data provide us, "Amado explains to this newspaper.

"The technique we are using is that of radial velocities (or Doppler method) which consists in measuring the movement that the planet produces in its star when it orbits it. Small and remote planets are very difficult to detect by this technique. In addition, how many the more worlds detected in a system, the more difficult it will be to detect additional objects due to the difficulty in interpreting the multiple signals that we will see in our data. Therefore, there could be for example smaller planets at intermediate distances between that of Next and Next c " .

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