Hey neighbor! Our lonely patch of the sky just got a little less lonely with the identification of a rocky, Earth-sized planet neighboring the star closest to our own Sun.

In a paper published today in Nature, researchers announced the exciting news that they had positively identified a planet about 1.3 times the size of Earth orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri 4.2 light years away.

The researchers made the observation by observing the star carefully over long periods of time. They found that once every 11.2 days, the light from the star shifted ever so slightly, a variation called a Doppler shift, during which the star appeared to be moving towards Earth slightly and then away from Earth slightly. That wobble indicated the presence of a planet.