Eve Reed and Louise Payne, from Cams Hill School, Fareham, have won the Space Confidential competition, which will now see them travel to Chicago to make their presentation at a prestigious conference.

The Year 10 pupils will appear in front of 600 astronomers, astrophysicists and lecturers at the end of June.

Twenty pupils worked in pairs with professors from Arizona and Boston universities for the past two months researching the possibility of discovering new planets and alien life.

Competition sponsors Global Immersion supplied the Shearwater Avenue school with its cutting-edge software, Uniview, which interprets live data from Nasa, ESA and the American Museum of Natural History – allowing users to explore the universe in planetaria and on PC screens.

The six pairs put forward to the grand final made presentations at the recently- opened Intech Planetarium in Winchester on its huge dome.

After two hours of students' planetarium shows, and a further two hours of decision making, the judges finally agreed on the winners.

Eve, 15, said: 'We're still absolutely speechless. The scale of the prize hasn't sunk in yet – I think we're both still in shock.'

Fourteen-year-old Louise added: 'I'm so proud of what we've accomplished as I didn't think we would have been capable of producing our own planetarium show.

'Everyone should have a chance at doing something like this, it's been a real learning curve for us both and we can't wait for our trip to Chicago now.'

Martin Howe, chief executive of Global Immersion, said: 'It was really difficult in the end to agree on a winning pair as every single one of the students put an immeasurable amount of time and effort into their contribution.

'The work was out of this world – literally.'

Mr Howe, who also chaired the judging panel, added: 'We couldn't let anyone go home empty-handed as everyone involved had worked so hard.'

Each of the finalists was also awarded a gift certificate and the school has been given two high-specification laptops and permanent licences of the Uniview software.