(Daily Star) – 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 Observatory’s 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 harbor alien life.

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 analyzing 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. READ MORE