Proxima Centauri B

Proxima Centauri is the nearest known star to Earth's Sun, 4.25 light years distant. In the fall of 2016, astronomers studying Proxima Centauri wrote a paper printed in Nature that described Proxima Centauri B, a small planet about 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting in a zone where liquid water could be present on its surface. (Another reference to a PDF version of the paper.) Thus, Proxima Centauri B might be habitable for humans.

Several articles were written in popular media:

• NPR had an artist's depiction, and discussed how habitable it could be.

• Quartz described what it might like to stand on its surface.

• Huffington Post talked to Seth Shostak, a noted astronomer in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI) community, about how to see if there's a technical civilization already living there.

• FiveThirtyEight.com looked at the statistics and the difficulties of finding Earth-like exoplanets.

• Medium.com looked at ten ways ‘Proxima B’ is different than Earth, because "Earth-like" doesn’t necessarily mean "like our Earth."

The search for exoplanets continues, and technology continues to improve the search. Two significant efforts are already underway:

• TESS: Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is the successor to the now-retired Kepler planet finder satellite. TESS can study more stars, with more sensitive equipment. TESS is hard at work in orbit, returning valuable data.

• JWST: James Webb Space Telescope is a large infrared optical telescope with a 6.5 meter primary mirror, launched on Christmas Day in 2021. The JWST is in a halo orbit, at the Sun–Earth L₂ Lagrange point. Data already received by the JWST has been able to tease apart the atmospheric spectra of several exoplanets. The Webb should be sensitive enough to determine the spectra of Proxima Centauri B's atmosphere, if it has one. That may even be good enough to detect the presence of life.

It's interesting that many of these sources appeared just before and just after the creation of the LARP.