Thanks to her work on a class project, a University of British Columbia science student has discovered four new planet candidates, including one, located 3,200 light years away from Earth, that could potentially support life-sustaining liquid water.

It was a needle in a haystack search for newly-graduated physics and astronomy student Michelle Kunimoto. She spent months of her final year at school poring over data collected from NASA's Kepler satellite as part of a class assignment aimed at giving students real-life exposure to a career in astronomy.

Eventually she found four tiny specks that all the other scientists who examined the data had likely missed.

What appeared only as pinpricks in an image data set, are actually two Earth-sized planet candidates: one Mercury-sized and one larger than Neptune.

It's the largest of her four discoveries, however, that has caught the attention of space experts – not only due to its size and unusual 637-day orbit around the sun, but because it's located in the habitable zone of its star, where conditions could allow liquid water, which means a possibility of life.

"Like our own Neptune, it's unlikely to have a rocky surface or oceans," Kunimoto said in a statement distributed by UBC on Monday.

"The exciting part is that like the large planets in our solar system, it could have large moons and these moons could have liquid water oceans."

KOI (Kepler Object of Interest) 408.05, as Kunimoto's planet candidate is now officially known, is the star of a paper she and her professor have submitted to the Astronomical Journal.

They are now awaiting independent confirmation whether their "planet candidate" will attain full planetary status.

Kunimoto will return to UBC in September to begin her Master's degree.