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 itself illuminates us at the wavelengths used for detection, and the infrared emissions from the sky, the camera and the telescope itself tend to drown out the signals we want to detect," says Kevin Wagner, NASA Hubble/Sagan post-doctoral fellow at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory and first author of the paper. But the good reason to focus on these wavelengths is that this is where an Earth-like planet, in the habitable zone around a sun-like star, will shine the brightest. "