A new ‘super-Earth’ planet has shown many of the key factors to supporting life as we know it, according to Professor Luke O’Neill.

NASA has discovered a planet known as HD20794d, which is located 20 light-years away from Earth in a habitable zone of a sun-like star.

Prof O’Neill told the Show Me The Science podcast that the planet is six times the size of Earth.

“It’s the right distance from the sun to sustain liquid water on the surface,” he said.

“Obviously, water is a key ingredient of life as we know it.

“It’s only 20 light-years away – that's a very, very long way away - but what they’re saying is, we may be able to send out probes to get closer to it and be able to measure it.

“Who knows, we may get images of this exoplanet that are really clear one day.”

An exoplanet refers to any planet outside of our own Solar System.

Planet and stars in outer space. Image: JG Photography / Alamy. 4 September 2019

According to Prof O’Neill, a lot of effort is being put into studying HD20794d.

“They’re now training the Extremely Large Telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets – called LIFE for short - [they’re all] now being trained on this thing,” he said.

“As I say, if you go into space now and begin imaging it, you might get much more information on this Earth-like planet in the habitable zone.

“They’re looking for what are called biosignatures, which are signs of life, or signs of complex biochemicals, I guess, forming living systems.

“So, who knows, maybe that exoplanet will be the place where we get strong evidence that life exists not on Earth, somewhere else in the universe."

Life on another planet

Prof O’Neill said that many experts believe it is “only a matter of time” before life on another planet is discovered.

“Now, it’ll be too far away for us to visit it, but still, it will tell us that there’s nothing special about life,” he said.

“It’s just a complex series of biochemical reactions that gave rise to the first cell and eventually evolution then worked on and finally got to us.”

Prof O’Neill said it is very unlikely that alien life would look anything like us, as our evolutionary development was a result of many random events.

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Main image: Luke O'Neill in the Newstalk studio (L) and a sunrise over planet earth (R).