New planet 'comparable to Earth'

An international team of scientists say their investigations of the closest star, Proxima Centauri, show it to have an Earth-sized planet in orbit around it.

What is more, this rocky globe is moving in a zone that would make liquid water on its surface a possibility.

Proxima is four light-years away and would take a spacecraft using current technology thousands of years to reach.

Nonetheless, the discovery of a planet potentially favourable to life in our cosmic neighbourhood is likely to fire the imagination.

Guillem Anglada-Escudé from Queen Mary University of London explained how the discovery was made to our correspondent Jonathan Amos.