Proxima Centauri might be more sunlike than we thought
In August astronomers announced that the nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (Called Proxima b) in its habitable zone. At first glance, Proxima Centauri seems nothing like our Sun. It's a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the Sun. However, new research shows that it is sunlike in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots. Ref. Source 9u.
Another close-by planetary system? The ALMA Observatory in Chile has detected dust around the closest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri. These new observations reveal the glow coming from cold dust in a region between one to four times as far from Proxima Centauri as the Earth is from the Sun. The data also hint at the presence of an even cooler outer dust belt and may indicate the presence of an elaborate planetary system. Source 4b.