E-Mail
IMAGE: Alpha Centauri A (left) and Alpha Centauri B imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Located in the constellation The Centaur, at a distance of 4.3 light-years, the pair of stars. view more
Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble
Imaging planets orbiting around nearby stars, which could potentially harbour life, has become a possibility thanks to the progress made in observational methods by an international team of astronomers. First candidate: Alpha Centauri, a system similar to ours, only 4.3 light years away. This study is the subject of a publication in the journal
Nature Communications.
Efforts to obtain direct images of exoplanets - planets outside our solar system - have so far been hampered by technological limitations, which have led to a bias towards detecting planets much larger than Jupiter, around very young stars and far from the habitable zone, the area in which a planet may have liquid water on its surface, and thus potentially life. The Earth itsel