On Monday, July 30, 2018 at 8:21:48 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:
Ran across this:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2015...-reconsidered/
I looked at Wikipedia, and found no mention of this controversy.
Then I looked at the original paper, and did a search for the names of its
authors... and found where on Wikipedia they are mentioned, and then checked
that against the paper.
It turns out that they debunked a *different* exoplanet, Alpha Centauri B b, not
Proxima Centauri b.
Proxima Centauri is at such a distance from Alpha Centauri that it was only
recently proved that it is gravitationally bound to Alpha Centauri. Alpha
Centauri B, on the other hand, orbits Alpha Centauri A at a mean distance of
23.4 AU in a highly eccentric orbit.
So no doubts about the existence of Proxima Centauri b have been raised after
all.
John Savard