The exciting discovery just 20 light-years away from Earth could play a 'pivotal role' in the search for life on other planets

Found by Dr Michael Cretignier of the University of Oxford, the planet has a mass six times greater than Earth's and orbits in a "habitable zone" of a star similar to the sun.

The study of exoplanets has come a long way since the first detection of a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun in 1995. This groundbreaking discovery, achieved through the radial velocity (RV) technique,

Thirty years after the discovery of the first exoplanet, astronomers have detected more than 7,000 of them in our galaxy. But there are still billions more to be discovered. At the same time, exoplanetologists have begun to take an interest in their characteristics,

The exoplanet – a planet outside our solar system – was spotted by Oxford University scientists orbiting in the ‘habitable zone’ of a nearby star similar to our sun, 20 li

With the discovery of a new "super-Earth," astronomers are hoping it could help answer one of the biggest questions in science: Are we alone in the universe? Super-Earths aren't typically much like our Earth in terms of habitability or composition.