A planet has been detected orbiting a star just 4 light years from Earth, making it the closest exoplanet to our solar system ever detected. The Earth sized planet lies in the three star Alpha Centauri system, which are our nearest stellar neighbors.

Alpha Centauri appears as a bright single object in the night sky but is actually made up of two sun like stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, which are orbited by the more distant red dwarf star Proxima Centauri.

The newly discovered planet orbits Alpha Centauri B at a distance of only 3.7 million miles (6 million km) and is believed to have a mass similar to Earth, which makes it the least massive planet orbiting a sun like star yet to be detected.

Alpha Centauri B has 86% the mass of the sun but is only around half as bright, The close proximity of the planet to its parent star means it must be a very hot world indeed, with estimated surface temperatures of around 1500C (2732F), if it has a rocky composition similar to Earth then its surface would be covered in molten lava.

The planet was detected using the European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS for short. It detects the slight wobbles affected on stars caused by the gravitational interactions with orbiting planets. Based in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile HARPS has discovered more than a hundred planets outside our solar system since 2004.

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