Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our solar system, just 4.25 light years away, yet it is completely invisible to the naked eye. This episode explores why a star sitting on our galactic front porch went undiscovered until Robert Innes spotted it in 1915, and what makes this M5.5 red dwarf so strange: only 12.5 percent of the Sun's mass, 33 times denser, burning at roughly 3,000 Kelvin, and radiating more than 85 percent of its energy as infrared light.

The conversation digs into the physics of a fully convective star that stirs its own fuel and could burn for four trillion years, the violent flare activity that made it 68 times brighter in 2016, and the planets caught in the crossfire, including the Earth-sized Proxima b discovered by the Pale Red Dot project. It also traces Proxima's 550,000-year orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B,  ...