Super Earth in ‘Goldilocks zone’ discovered with new alien-hunting tool – now it will search for more habitable planets

SCIENTISTS have stumbled across a new Super-Earth that orbits inside its star’s habitable zone with a new alien-hunting tool.

Searching for Earth-like planets – and Earth-like life – is the ultimate goal for planetary science.

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And finding planets that lie in the Goldilocks zone of their sun-like stars – where the conditions are ‘just right’ to possibly host life – is key to that mission.

An international team of scientists, led by the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), have used a new technique to find these potentially habitable worlds.

It’s called the Transit Timing Variation (TTV) technique – which looks for changes in the predicted transit times of an exoplanet.

If the time changes, it could indicate the presence of other unseen planets in the system that are gravitationally influencing the transiting planet. 

The technique is a good way to detect smaller planets that would otherwise be difficult to find

By analysing the TTV signals of Kepler-725b, a gas giant planet in the same system, the team were able to find its hidden sister planet Kepler-725c, according to a new study published in Nature Astronomy.

Researchers said the technique offers a promising alternative in the hunt for “Earth 2.0.”

Kepler-725c has 10 times the mass of Earth and is located in the habitable zone of the sun-like star Kepler-725. 

It receives roughly 1.4 times the solar radiation than Earth does.

Located in the Lyra constellation, the Super Earth planet completes an orbit of its nearby star every 207.5 days.

During part of this orbit, the planet enters its star’s habitable zone – meaning it could host alien life.

Little else is known about the planet so far.

It is the first time it has been used to discover a Super-Earth, a type of rocky exoplanet that is larger than Earth but too small to be considered a gas giant like Neptune.

Astronomers have relied on alternative techniques to find exoplanets for decades.

Like the transit method, where astronomers track how the light from a host star dims when a planet passes in front of it.

Or through radial velocity (RV) observations, which is when scientists watch the slight wobble of a star as it interacts with the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

However, both of these techniques have their flaws and make it difficult to detect planets with long orbital periods.

The transit approach, for example, requires a planet’s orbit to align exactly with our line of sight from Earth.

Whereas the RV method requires extremely high-precision measurements, which makes it harder to find smaller planets.

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