An international team of astronomers has discovered evidence of a new planet near the nearest star to the solar system, Proxima Centauri, four light years away, writes LentaRu.

It is one of the lightest exoplanets ever found, having a mass of a quarter of the mass of the Earth, journal Astronomy & Astrophysics writes.

It is known that the presence of planets shifts the center of gravity of stars and gives them a radial velocity, which is evident from the Doppler effect, expressed in a periodic shift of spectral lines in the red (the star is moving away from the observer) and blue (the star is approaching the observer) regions of the spectrum. Red dwarf stars like Proxima Centauri produce powerful flares that mask the radial velocity associated with exoplanets. To solve this problem, scientists used the ESPRESSO high-precision spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.