What Would Actually Happen After Humans Arrived at Proxima Centauri?

Stand on Proxima b, the planet circling the nearest star to the Sun, and that star hangs three times wider than our Sun, giving you warmth but only about two percent of the light. It may never move in the sky. Your first message home takes four years and three months to arrive. The star throws flares thousands of times brighter in ultraviolet, and nobody yet knows whether the planet kept its air. Tonight we follow what would really happen after we arrived, from the first step onto the twilight line to the long future of a red sun that may outlast every star like ours. Settle in under the copper light. #ProximaCentauri #ProximaB #NearestStar Sources: Anglada-Escudé et al. (2016), A terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit around Proxima Centauri, Nature: nature.com/articles/nature19106 Faria et al. (2022), A candidate short-period sub-Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri, A&A: arxiv.org/abs/2202.05188 Howard et al. (2018), The First Naked-eye Superflare Detected from Proxima Centauri, ApJL: arxiv.org/abs/1804.02001 Ribas et al. (2016), The habitability of Proxima Centauri b: I. Irradiation, rotation and volatile inventory, A&A: arxiv.org/abs/1608.06813 Garcia-Sage et al. (2017), An Earth-like Atmosphere May Not Survive Proxima b's Orbit, NASA Astrobiology: astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/an-earth-like-atmosphere-may-not-survive-proxima-bs-orbit Breakthrough Starshot, official program page: breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3 ---