Joe Yates
Our universe is so great that there has to be life out there - I mean, it's literally still expanding in every direction.
Well, we could be closer to discovering whether there really is alien life out there after researchers discovered a new 'super-Earth' which is six times bigger than our planet and may well inhabit extraterrestrials.
A team of scientists from Oxford University in England have identified an exoplanet - named HD 20794 - as far as 20 light-years away from our solar system.
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It's the right distance away from its sun to be able to hold water on the surface of the planet, but due to its orbit of the star being far more oval than Earth's, scientists could not verify whether it could host life.
While we're only just hearing about it, Dr Michael Cretignier, a postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Physics at the college, actually identified it three years ago back in 2022, while looking through archived data which was recorded at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Although, at the time he couldn't confirm whether or not it was a planet and so needed the help of a crew from around the globe, who worked together to analyze data over the last two decades.
"With its location in a habitable zone and relatively close proximity to Earth, this planet could play a pivotal role in future missions that will characterise the atmospheres of exoplanets to search for biosignatures indicating potential life," Cretignier said.
"We worked on data analysis for years, gradually analysing and eliminating all possible sources of contamination.
"For me, it was naturally a huge joy when we could confirm the planet's existence.
"It was also a relief, since the original signal was at the edge of the spectrograph’s detection limit, so it was hard to be completely convinced at that time if the signal was real or not."
He went on to explain that 'excitingly', with it being 'only 20 light-years' away from us, there is a possibility that future missions to space could 'obtain an image of it'.
Dr Cretignier concluded: "While my job mainly consists of finding these unknown worlds, I’m now very enthusiastic to hear what other scientists can tell us about this newly discovered planet, particularly since it is among the closest Earth-analogues we know about and given its peculiar orbit."
His study, 'Revisiting the multi-planetary system of the nearby star HD 20794. Confirmation of a low-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby G-dwarf’, has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.