Proxima Centauri is a small, low-mass star located 4. 244 light-years away from the Sun. It is a flare star that undergoes random dramatic increases in brightness because of magnetic activity. It has two known planets. ProXima b is estimated to be within the habitable zone of the star, but its habitability is disputed. A potential directly imaged source was found in infrared images from the Very Large Telescope, but the authors believe further confirmation is required.
About Proxima Centauri in brief
Proxima Centauri is a small, low-mass star located 4. 244 light-years away from the Sun. It is a flare star that undergoes random dramatic increases in brightness because of magnetic activity. Proxima is a red dwarf star with a mass about an eighth of the Sun’s mass. It will be a main-sequence star for another four trillion years. The star’s magnetic field is created by convection throughout the stellar body, and the resulting flare activity generates a total X-ray emission similar to that produced by the sun. It has two known planets. ProXima b is estimated to be within the habitable zone of the star, but its habitability is disputed. A potential directly imaged source was found in infrared images from the Very Large Telescope, but the authors believe further confirmation is required. If confirmed, Proxime Centauri c will be the closest exoplanet ever directlyImaged. The International Astronomical Union organized a Working Group on Star Names to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN approved a standard name for stars for the WGSA satellite in 1995. The most recent study by most X-Ray observatories, including XMM-Newton and Chandra, approved the name for the star in 2016. The name was approved by the WNGSN proper names group on October 1, 2013.
The current name is WGSG-N (WGSN-N-1) which stands for the Working Group for Star Names in the Nomenclature of the Astronomers (W.N.C.A.I.I). The name WGS-N was approved on October 2, 2013, by the Astronomy and Astrophysics Society of America (ASA) and the Astronomical Society of Japan (ASJ) The name has been approved for use by the International Astronomy Association (IAA) as the name of a working group for stars in the constellation of Centaurus. The Latin name means the \”nearest ofCentaurus\”. It is currently 12,950 AU from AB, which it orbits with a period of about 550,000 years. Its actual diameter is about one-seventh the diameter of the sun, and it has a parallax of 0. 783″±0. 005″. It was discovered in 1915 by Robert Innes, Director of the Union Observatory in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is the nearest-known star to the Sun, with a quiescent apparent magnitude of 11. 13. Because of its proximity to Earth, it is too faint to be seen with the naked eye, but it can be measured directly. A super-Earth, Pro Xima Centauri c, orbiting roughly 1. 5 AU away every 1,900 d, was discovered in 2019 with the radial velocity technique using the ESO HARPS instrument and confirmed in 2020 using archival astrometric data from Hubble Space Telescope from c. 1995.
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This page is based on the article Proxima Centauri published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
