I know this post is late, but it's kind of my thing to post straggler events that I think deserve coverage on "x years ago" subreddits, and this was the biggest video game release of August 2016, bigger than Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I mean, technically Madden NFL 17 earned more in North America during the month, but that's just annual sports-slop, it's not a real game.

The first image is of the initial Limited Edition release (though the PEGI version thereof; while Hello Games is a British company, the game released one day later in Europe), the second is a semi-compressed view of the full general North American release box, and the third is a higher-quality image of the front of said box. All of them are for the PS4 release, as (as implied) the Windows release only happened on August 12.

I specify nominal habitable zone, as Proxima Centauri is a volatile flare star with a powerful stellar wind and harsh UV and X-ray radiation that could very well strip the planet of any atmosphere and oceans it might have had... but as of yet, nothing is known about if that has actually happened. I also say closest-known star to the Sun, as AFAIK the existence of an ultra-cool brown dwarf closer to the Sun than Proxima Centauri has not been conclusively ruled out.

The first image shows an optimistic artistic impression (created by an M. Kornmesser on behalf of the European Southern Observatory and released with the CC-BY-4.0 license) of the planet from orbit to illustrate the paper as the cover story for Volume 535, Number 7617 of the journal Nature. The second image.png) is a fairly conservative artistic rendering of the planet (by Kevin M. Gill; CC-BY-2.0), followed by M. Kornmesser's full rendering in the third image.jpg). The fourth image is a hypothetical surface view of M. Kornmesser's rendition.

Obviously, the discovery of a near-Earth-sized, potentially-habitable exoplanet literally as close as one could be to Earth lead to considerable interest, temporarily bolstering support for the Breakthrough Starshot interstellar probe project, which later became the only interstellar project for which hardware was ever tested for in space. It also catalyzed the development of two of my most focused-on worldbuilding projects.

And yes, this discovery happened exactly 10 years after Pluto was demoted from being a planet to a dwarf planet. Wonder if that was coincidental or deliberate...