 Welcome everyone as you've already understood you are about to hear about a very exciting discovery maybe even a momentous one. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and thank you for attending this conference today. We my colleagues and I are here today representing the Pale Red Dot collaboration. This is an international project of 31 scientists from eight countries all around the world who have used two ISO instruments and two other photometric observatories to search for exoplanets around a particular star our closest neighbor Proxima Centauri. As I say it was nothing like what we had seen before this gas giant was orbiting the star much closer than Mercury does the Sun but the discovery of more than 3000 exoplanets to date has revealed the complexity and diversity of exoplanetary systems and how they change over time. We are also starting to characterize their bulk properties and those of their atmospheres which gets particularly interesting for terrestrial planets in temperate orbits at a distance that allows liquid water on their surfaces what we call the habitable zone. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf belonging to the Alpha Centauri Estella group which includes also two solar light stars Alpha Centauri A and B. It is the star closest to our solar system at 4.2 light years but even so it is at around 3000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. You will understand the difficulty of detecting this movement if you can imagine the huge sphere of hot plasma that the star is moving just at the speed of a person walking on the street. As an example Proxima Centauri is just about one tenth of the mass and radius of our Sun gathering more than 500 data points in three different surveys of Proxima Centauri. Okay so we have found that the terrestrial planet orbiting Proxima Centauri is the nearest exoplanet we will ever found because it is the nearest star to the Sun and we are very excited about it. So we had this payload campaign which had been a specially designed experiment. We had this evidence of the signal around the star in a period around 11 and 20 days and we used the Harp Suspectograph which is currently the most precise machine and we can do this on Proxima just because it's the nearest one and we were getting this continuous monitoring covering at least five cycles of this putative signal so that was the key of the campaign. So if you have a signal it will show like here you have a peak something that stands up against this noise and then you have these horizontal lines which are the detection thresholds so at some point when you accumulate enough data the signal just goes above these detection thresholds so yes the signal has been consistent for the last 16 years this is a strong huge statistically evidence. The temperature that you would have on the surface of this planet if there's no atmosphere is actually minus 40 degrees which is not spectacular but of course we all want this planet to have an atmosphere and if it has an atmosphere it is actually pushing up the temperature through the greenhouse effect above zero degrees and in the liquid water habitable zone. Now the star has only 20% of the solar mass and it's also much cooler it's a kind of a very different star and that's that makes the planet fall into the habitable zone. We expect and we completely trust that a planet with a mass of 1.3 earth masses is a terrestrial planet. It is a general misconception that these M dwarfs are flaring like hell and that you cannot nothing can survive in their proximity because they're so active but it's not like going on like hell up there most probably so this is this is what we know about the star and we can study it in detail so this does not exclude the existence of an atmosphere and if the planet does have an atmosphere it would not get blown away or something by today's activity of the star. We have no clue whether this planet has an atmosphere or not whether it has water or not but the existence of it is actually plausible. It will be possible in the future to take pictures of the system with technology that is not too far away it also makes it within reach of space probes we will hear this later this is a planet in our neighborhood and we will we will start thinking about how we can actually take a picture from somewhere else then on earth so maybe finally we send out a camera and actually take a picture which would be the most spectacular thing I think we could think about. Bottom line that Proxima B is indeed our neighbor so let us get used to it. Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking announced Breakthrough Starshot. It's a privately funded initiative to begin developing humanity's first probe to another star system. We intend to developing nanocraft weighing less than one gram attached to a light sail. We will use an extremely powerful laser on the ground to push hundreds of these nanocraft to approximately 20 percent of the light speed and direct them towards the nearest star system which includes three stars Alpha Centauri A and B and of course Proxima Centauri. A return laser communication signal back to earth containing images and other data of the planet such as Proxima B orbiting these stars. We have assembled a team of the world's most knowledgeable experts to assess this question. These experts included scientists working here at the European Southern Observatory. With today's announcement we now know there's at least one planet the one orbiting Proxima Centauri that has some characteristics similar to the earth. Over the next decade we will work with experts here at ESO and elsewhere to get as much information as possible about the Proxima Centauri planet perhaps as noted even including whether it might bear life. Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg oversee our project. The suggestion of the Proxima Centauri discovery was truly inspirational then. After our initial research phase we hope to build a privately funded prototype system costing between 500 million and 1 billion US dollars. So we are really excited and to use the US term pumped about this discovery. We're on our way and thanks the team and thanks to the European Southern Observatory. We believe that most likely it is face locked which means that a day is a year and it's always facing the same sign to the star. 10 years ago it would have been very suspicious to detect this planet. People would not believe in this planet. There were a lot of misconceptions about the end wars being too active and tidal lock doesn't allow life to exist or even an atmosphere. This is not true because people have invested time so I think it's actually the right time to report this. We are not reporting the first planet we are reporting the last planet we find. We are reporting a very special one that it's close to to the sun and that's the big news here. Now with technologies we understand today it's not possible to send bigger things and certainly not possible to send people so that may be centuries in the future if ever. By maybe 2060 or so you'll be flying by Proxima Sen as well as some of the other nearby stars and that we can get these images that we hope to see. Is there life there? I mean there could be advanced life those are some of the great questions I think are going to be answered this century. So we have high expectations that this is actually a multi-planet system so we keep looking. Could star shot re-aimed Proxima be? I guess. The answer is yes and we are looking probably at having the laser beamer that would be in Chile it's the most likely location. It's only a few degrees the difference between the Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri so from the beginning we had looked at sending nano probes hundreds of them to both star systems. What this now tells us is that we know there's at least one very interesting target that's within range of our proposed system. What the chances of a false positive are? Do you have an element? Statistical false positive is really tiny it's about one in ten million something like this. So far as we know there is no false positive that can explain this planet or this signal.