The planet closest to the Solar System is actually just a planet.

Alpha Centauri bb, the closest identified planet to our Solar System, disappeared earlier this week. Scientists say in a new study that it never existed.

Alpha Centauri bb is actually a ghost planet in the solar system

Alpha Centauri bb planet was discovered orbiting the host star closest to the Solar System in 2012. At that time, it was considered a breakthrough discovery. Alpha Centauri bb exists as a planet of mass similar to Earth, orbiting the host star at the same distance as Mercury with the Sun.

Alpha Centauri bb is just a 'ghost' planet in the database.

What makes Alpha Centauri bb attract scientists' attention is that it's only 4.3 light years away. At this distance, it won the first place for the planet like Earth near the Solar System. The planetary system that exists also becomes the backdrop for fictional films like Avatar and Transformers.

However, one year after being discovered, an independent research team was unable to observe Alpha Centauri bb. They found very weak signs for its existence. And this week, the official study published suggested that Alpha Centauri bb is actually just a 'ghost' planet in the database.

This research rang an alarm bell for astrophysicists looking for distant planets. At the same time it reminds us of the difficulty of current science and technology in observing the universe.

Typically, a distant planet is discovered in two ways. Scientists observe light coming from the star to look for signs of the planet orbiting it. Or they will determine the star's 'wobble' , evidence that it is pulling around a few planets.

This second method is more popular in the search for the existence of large planets, and it has been used to confirm the existence of Alpha Centauri bb. However, the signals from the stellar system where Alpha Centauri bb was not monitored continuously. At the size of Earth, Alpha Centauri bb is also at high risk of being confused by noise signals.

In 2012, Alpha Centauri bb is considered a breakthrough discovery.

The group of scientists led by Vinesh Rajpaul, a student doing post-graduate research at Oxford University, found that an astronaut is also capable of causing light signals to make us wrong. Imagine it has a planet in orbit. They created the simulation model of such a star and made the planets observed.

'When we created aggregate data, the planet appeared, although it didn't exist,' Rrajpaul told National Geographic.

Prior to this announcement, Xavier Dumusque, who discovered Alpha Centauri bb from the Smithsonian Space Physics Center, Harvard admitted that Rajpaul's research was convincing.'This is really a good study , ' Xavier said. 'We are not 100% sure, but maybe this planet is highly capable of not existing'.

It is clear that Alpha Centauri bb is not true but exists as a 'ghost' planet in our database for 2 years. However, the good news is that most of our planets have detected outside the Solar System at very low risk to follow this trail. The planets observed with the Kepler telescope are flying in orbit, they are not easily fooled by noise signals. Still, scientists have to be more careful in the future.