An artist's concept of the alien planet Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size alien planet to be discovered in the habitable zone of a sunlike star. NASA unveiled the exoplanet discovery on July 23, 2015. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)
A "Super-Earth" planet that's one-and-half-times the size of our own has emerged as the most likely candidate to support alien life.
There's just one problem: Kepler 452b, as it's known, lies beyond the confines of our solar system – a whopping 1,400 light years away from us.
Discovered in 2015, the planet is located slap bang in the middle of a newly spotted "abiogenesis zone" that holds the right conditions for life to be created, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
This region of the solar system contains the ideal mix of ultraviolet light and chemical reactions to usher in early life.