Read on Twitter
We have some very nice news! Today we are announcing our independent confirmation of Proxima b using ESPRESSO.
The preprint is available in arXiv right now: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12114 ">https://arxiv.org/abs/2005....
This is very exciting news. Not only because of the confirmation of Proxima b, but because it shows the amazing things you can achieve using ESPRESSO and the @ESO VLTs
Most of you probably know, but Proxima b was originally announced in 2016 by @GuillemAnglada . That was one of the most exciting discoveries in exoplanet science in recent years. It was detected using HARPS (ESPRESSO& #39;s predecesor), and the original RV curve looked like this:
Fast forward a few years and we now have ESPRESSO, which is much more precise than HARPS, and also installed in a bigger telescope. Going back to Proxima was one of our priorities, and in the end it became our first detection of an exoplanet.
We observed Proxima intensively during 2019, and obtained 63 measurements with a median precision better than 30 cm/s. The RV curves are beautiful.
When you combine the data with HARPS & UVES, the contrast is astonishing. Even without taking into account that we& #39;ve been years tinkering with HARPS and UVES RVs to extract all the information present in he spectra. With ESPRESSO we are just getting started.
A question I& #39;m sure many of you have: Is there something else there? We know Proxima b, and the long period planet Proxima c, but M-dwarfs tend to host many low-mass planets. Can we find something else using ESPRESSO?
We found another signal in the RVs. A very small signal of just 40 cm/s amplitude and 5.15d period, but we could not confirm it was indeed a planet. What does this mean? Basically that there& #39;s still plenty of work to do on Proxima.
I want to finish coming back to this image of the header of the preprint. Getting here was a long journey. It didn& #39;t start when we started observing Proxima. It started 10 years before, and involved many people. Here you can see the wonderful team that made this possible.
The article is accepted for publication in @AandA_journal. The published version should be available soon.
