Fritz Benedict, an astronomer at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, has used
data he took over twenty-five years ago using the Hubble Space Telescope to
confirm the existence of another planet around Proxima Centauri.
in 2016, planet Proxima Cenaturi b was discovered.
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Originally Posted by McDonald Observatory
Adding to the excitement, earlier this year a group led by Mario Damasso of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) announced they might have found another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri farther out. This group used radial velocity observations, that is, measurements of the star’s motion on the sky toward and away from Earth, to deduce the possible planet (dubbed Proxima Centauri c) orbits the star every 1,907 days at distance of 1.5 AU (that is, 1.5 times the distance at which Earth orbits the Sun).
Still, the existence of planet c was far from certain. Thus Benedict decided to re-visit his studies of Proxima Centauri from the 1990s made with Hubble Space Telescope. For that study, he had used Hubble’s Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS).
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Full press release here :-
https://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/20200602
