space
In 2025, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope found strong evidence for a gas giant orbiting in the habitable zone of the nearest sun-like star to our own solar system.
The candidate giant planet orbits Alpha Centauri A, the nearest sun-like star to our own Sun, part of the three-star Alpha Centauri system. Using the James Webb Space Telescope's sensitive infrared instrument together with earlier ground-based observations, astronomers gathered the strongest evidence yet for a planet roughly the mass of Saturn circling that star within its habitable zone.
Proxima Centauri and Barnard's Star are both real, nearby stars that host their own known or suspected planets, but they are much smaller, cooler red dwarf stars, not sun-like stars, so this particular candidate planet belongs to Alpha Centauri A instead.
Even though the planet sits in a zone where temperatures could theoretically allow liquid water, being a gas giant with no solid surface means it could not itself support life the way a rocky planet might.
space
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