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Alien hope as signal from 'habitable planet' found by scientists

The potential planet is in a "habitable zone" of Alpha Centauri, a binary star system 4.37 light-years away from Earth, and could have liquid water on its surface

Scientists may have discovered a new Neptune-sized planet within a habitable orbit of one of Earth's closest stars.

The body, which has yet to even be named and is being referred to currently as planet candidate, is in Alpha Centauri, a binary star system 4.37 light-years away from Earth.

In a paper published in Nature Communications on Wednesday, an international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile found a bright thermal imaging signal coming from the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A.

A habitable zone covers the range of distances from a star at which liquid water could exist on a world's surface, an indicator that it could harbour alien life.

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A search is on for habitable planets around Alpha Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System(Image: GETTY )

The signal was derived through Near Earths in the Alpha Center Region (NEAR), a $3 million project which hunts for potentially Earth-like worlds around nearby stars.

The NEAR team upgraded the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) with several new technologies, including a thermal coronagraph, an instrument designed to block a star's light and allow the heat signatures of orbiting planets to be spotted.

After analysing 100 hours of data gathered by NEAR in May and June of 2019, the scientists detected a thermal fingerprint in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A which corresponds to a roughly Neptune-size world.

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An image of Alpha Centauri by the Hubble Space Telescope(Image: NASA/ESA)

We detected something, said Pete Klupar, the chief engineer of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which are a raft of space projects funded by Yuri Milner, an entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. It could be an artefact in the machine or it could be a planet, or it could be asteroids or dust.

Scientists are remaining cautious about the finding until they can fully verify their findings.

The study's lead author Kevin Wagner, a Sagan Fellow in NASA's Hubble Fellowship Program at the University of Arizona, said in a statement: "There is one point source that looks like what we would expect a planet to look like, that we can't explain with any of the systematic error corrections.

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Experts believe the planet could harbour life(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

"We are not at the level of confidence to say we discovered a planet around Alpha Centauri, but there is a signal there that could be that with some subsequent verification."

In a statement to Space.com, he added: "We were amazed to find a signal in our data. While the detection meets every criteria for what a planet would look like, alternative explanations such as dust orbiting within in the habitable zone or simply an instrumental artifact of unknown origin have to be ruled out.

"Verification might take some time and will require the involvement and ingenuity of the larger scientific community."

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