‘Excitingly’ it’s ‘only 20 light-years’ away from us, discoverer Dr Michael Cretignier explained
Our Universe is so vast that there simply has to be life beyond Earth—I mean, it’s still expanding infinitely in all directions.
Well, we might be closer than ever to uncovering whether alien life truly exists after researchers identified a newly discovered ‘super-Earth’—a planet six times larger than our own, which could potentially be home to extraterrestrial beings.
A group of scientists from Oxford University in England has pinpointed an exoplanet, known as HD 20794, located approximately 20 light-years away from our solar system.
Positioned at a distance from its star that could allow for liquid water to exist on its surface, the planet holds intriguing possibilities. However, due to its highly elliptical orbit—unlike Earth’s—scientists have yet to confirm if it could sustain life.
While the world is only now learning about this discovery, Dr. Michael Cretignier, a postdoctoral research assistant in the university’s Department of Physics, actually first detected the planet back in 2022 while sifting through archived data recorded at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
At that time, he couldn’t be certain whether it was truly a planet and required assistance from an international team, who spent years analyzing two decades’ worth of data to confirm its existence.
“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 further explained that, “excitingly,” because the planet is “only 20 light-years” away, there is hope that future space missions may eventually be able to “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.
