KEPLER-22B may be the most Earth-like world yet found in the galaxy — and it could be home to alien life.

It orbits a star like the Sun 600 light years — that’s nearly 4,000BILLION MILES — away in the constellation Cygnus.

Importantly, the planet lies inside the habitable zone of its solar system, so-called because it is not too hot and not too cold for life to exist. Water — an essential requirement for life as we know it — would be a liquid.

Christmas would come around sooner there every year, because it takes just 290 days to go round its parent star.

Scientists cannot tell for sure yet whether Kepler-22b is a rocky world, a ball of gas or even a liquid object.

But its discovery, announced this week, suggests we’re getting closer to discovering we’re not alone in the universe.

The Kepler mission, launched in March 2009, has discovered more than 2,000 candidate planets — 200 are around the size of Earth.

Kepler looks for new worlds by monitoring 100,000 stars.

If sometimes the star’s light is not quite so bright, it guesses that a planet has crossed in front of its sun like an eclipse. Kepler has only been looking close to home in our galaxy, called the Milky Way.

There are 50billion other galaxies and each probably has more than 50billion stars — so somewhere out there there is very likely alien life looking hopefully into the universe wondering if they are alone.

It’s all very well being able to detect life far, far away when we will probably be unable to visit it. What I’d like to do is find it much closer — on Mars.

That is why I attempted to land a UK-built robot, Beagle 2, there to look for signs of life in 2003.

Sadly the mission was lost but the quest to explore Mars continues with NASA’s latest mission Mars Science Laboratory.

Next August nuclear-powered vehicle Curiosity will be lowered into a Mars crater that is believed to be a dried-up lake.

In 1989 my colleagues and I predicted life on Mars when we discovered the right sort of chemicals in a meteorite from Mars.

Perhaps we’ll be proved right.

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