Astronomers found strong evidence that a gassy Jupiter-size world is orbiting one of three stars in the stellar system closest to our own.

It would orbit within Alpha Centauri A’s habitable zone, the starlight-bathed region where liquid water can persist on a planet’s surface. Announced on August 7 and described in two preprint papers that have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters,

The discovery was made using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which detected a likely gas giant around Alpha Centauri A- one of three stars in the Alpha Centauri system, just over four light-years from Earth.