Proxima Centauri b: Modeling Habitability, Atmospheres, and the Potential for Life on a Nearby Exoplanet

To the point

Proxima Centauri b is a planet about 4.22 light-years away that sits in its star’s habitable zone, and Victoria Meadows and a team including Giada Arney, Edward Schwieterman, and Rodrigo Luger are using computer models and observations to figure out if life could exist there, how its water, mass, and atmosphere might have formed or changed (perhaps starting with a gas envelope before losing hydrogen), how its red dwarf’s flares could affect its air and surface, whether tidal locking could be offset by global winds to keep a stable climate, and how to detect atmospheric clues that distinguish life from non-life, with future observations potentially letting us study it directly and learn about how life-bearing worlds might look beyond our solar system.