Scientists may have found the first planet ever detected around our closest “solar twin,” a star called Alpha Centauri A, the same real-life star that was home to the fictional moon Pandora in James Cameron’s “Avatar.”
Using the world’s most powerful space telescope, astronomers working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles County spotted evidence of a Saturn-like world in our solar twin’s habitable zone—the region where temperatures could allow water to exist.
But scientists say that’s not all. It’s just four light-years away, which would make it the nearest planet of its kind ever seen—practically next door in cosmic terms.
KTLA spoke with the co–first authors on this discovery to learn how, if confirmed, this planet would be a real-world counterpart to the worlds of science fiction and a prime target for future exploration.
Earth’s closest ‘solar twin’
Alpha Centauri A is almost a twin to our sun in size, age and temperature, according to NASA. It’s part of a triple-star system that also includes Alpha Centauri B, another sun-like star, and Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf with three confirmed planets.
“It’s the third-brightest star in the sky, and by far the closest star like our sun,” said Charles Beichman, executive director of NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech. “If you lived in the southern hemisphere, you could point to that star and say it has a planet like Saturn. And it’s only four light-years away.”
Alpha Centauri has also been a favorite in science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke’s 1950s novel “Songs of Distant Earth” imagined a planet called Pasadena orbiting Alpha Centauri A. It’s a remarkable coincidence as Pasadena is home to Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the very institutions now leading this potential discovery.
In “Avatar,” the lush moon Pandora circles a gas giant in the same system… and what would this new planet be if confirmed?
Finding the Saturn-like planet
This planet, too, would be a gas giant, like Saturn or Jupiter. While it wouldn’t support life as we know it, its location around a sun-like star so close to Earth makes it a historic find.
In August 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope aimed its ultra-sensitive mid-infrared camera at Alpha Centauri A. Using a special mask to block the star’s glare, scientists hoped to spot faint planetary light—an incredibly tricky feat made harder by the bright companion star, Alpha Centauri B.
Webb is built to see the faintest galaxies at the edge of the universe, not planets next door.
“We had to come up with novel strategies to subtract out the contaminating starlight from both stars,” said Aniket Sanghi, a Caltech astrophysics PhD student and co–first author of the study.
Engineers had to develop a custom observing sequence just for this target. “It’s like trying to photograph a firefly next to a searchlight from thousands of miles away,” Beichman said.
JPL announced the discovery on Aug. 7, following a year of observations and analysis.
A name for the new world
“Well, let’s see,” Beichman started. “Arthur C. Clark named it Pasadena, the ‘Avatar’ people named it Polyphemus … but none of those are very likely. Astronomers tend to come up with very unromantic names.”
Officially, Beichman said any confirmed planet would likely be called Alpha Centauri A b, following astronomical convention. But, if it were up to him, he’d have something else in mind.
“I promised my daughter I’d name a planet after her,” Beichman said with a grin.
However, as discovered during the interview with KTLA, the initials of “Alpha Centauri A b” fittingly match his daughter’s first and last name, Annabel Beichman. Beichman laughed when this was pointed out to him during the interview, nodding his head in approval. “That’s how I want to sell it to her,” he joked.
The case of the disappearing planet
The first images taken showed something remarkable: a faint, Saturn-sized object glowing in the star’s habitable zone, over 10,000 times dimmer than Alpha Centauri A.
Then, it was gone.
Follow-up Webb observations in February and April 2025 came up empty. But computer models suggest the planet may have simply moved into a position where Webb couldn’t see it—much like Beichman described as a firefly disappearing in bright headlights.
“In half of the possible orbits we simulated, the planet moved too close to the star to be visible,” Sanghi said.
A similar “now you see it, now you don’t” story happened in the early 2000s with a planet around a star called Beta Pictoris. That planet later reappeared, and Beichman’s team hopes to catch this planet around Alpha Centauri again in its next visible position.
Why this matters
If confirmed, this would be the first planet found around Alpha Centauri A, the closest sun-like star to Earth. It’s also the nearest planet of its kind in the habitable zone of any sun-like star.
“For the first time we’re able to take a picture of a planet in the habitable zone of its star,” Sanghi said.
Similar in temperature and age to Saturn or Jupiter, it could help scientists compare our own gas giants with those beyond our solar system.
Its existence would also challenge theories about how planets form and survive in double-star systems. “This would become a touchstone object for exoplanet science,” Beichman said.
A target worth chasing
Whether it reappears this year or next, the idea of a planet just four light-years away, circling a star so much like our sun, has already captured imaginations.
“It’s like a movie,” said Beichman. “There’s a long list of credits that went into making this possible, and, to me, that’s one of the most satisfying parts. We had a number of ups and downs along the way, and a lot of people had to stick with it and make it work.”
The team plans to use the James Webb Telescope again to confirm the sighting, nail down the orbit, and learn more about the planet’s atmosphere and size.
“We can now do a deep dive on our nearest solar neighbor with the most powerful space telescope,” Sanghi said. “Alpha Centauri has fascinated the public for years, and now we’ve found something very interesting there: a candidate planet. It’s something to celebrate.”
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