From Dr. Becky.
AD | Go to https://ground.news/drbecky to stay fully informed with the latest Space and Science news. Save 40% off the Vantage plan through my link for unlimited access | Our best chance of finding intelligent life out there in the Universe that we could even hope to have any communications with is if there’s a planet orbiting around the nearest star to Earth just over 4 light years away. 4 years for a message to travel there, and 4 more years for any message to travel back. That is the alpha Centauri system of 3 stars: there’s two Sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, that orbit each other, plus the technically closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, a faint red dwarf star, which orbits the other two. Now while there has been much excitement about the 2 (maybe 3) planets discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri, as we gather more evidence from other stars, its looking less likely that red dwarf stars are good places to look for life because of the harmful x-ray radiation they give off. But all hope is not lost because there’s also those two Sun-like stars in the same system, but as yet no planets around them have been found, until now, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, with these two research papers published last month by Beichman and collaborators and Sanghi and collaborators claiming to have found a candidate gas giant exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri A. But it is only a candidate for now, it’s not a confirmed discovery just yet, so why is that…?
Beichman et al. (2025) – https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03814
Sanghi et al. (2025) – http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03812
Damasso et al. (2020) – https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax7467
00:00 – Introduction
04:03 – Why it’s so hard to find planets around our nearest stars
08:31 The discovery of this candidate planet around alpha Centauri A with JWST
10:33 Why it’s only a candidate exoplanet for now…
14:39 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
