Astronomers at the University of Canterbury (UC) have found an incredibly rare new Super-Earth planet towards the center of the galaxy. The planet is one of only a handful that have been discovered with both size and orbit comparable to that of Earth. The planet is one of only a handful that have been discovered with both size and orbit comparable to that of Earth. The planet-hunters’ research has recently been published in The Astronomical Journal. The super-Earth discovery was a fortuitous event that UC described as “one in a million.” The astronomers used a gravitational microlensing technique to spot the planet. “The combined gravity of the planet and its host star caused the light from a more distant background star to be magnified in a particular way. We used telescopes distributed around the world to measure the light-bending effect,” said UC astronomer Antonio Herrera Martin. There’s a lot of hope wrapped up in a term like “super-Earth,” but there are no guarantees a planet in this category will look anything like our own. NASA describes super-Earths as “up to 10 times more massive than Earth,” but says they may vary in composition from water worlds to icy planets to ones made mainly of gas. NASA has racked up some intriguing super-Earth discoveries in recent years, including the potentially habitable Kepler 62f. Dr. Herrera Martin explains the planet was discovered using a technique called gravitational microlensing. “The combined gravity of the planet and its host star caused the light from a more distant background star to be magnified in a particular way. We used telescopes distributed around the world to measure the light-bending effect.” “These experiments detect around 3000 microlensing events each year, the majority of which are due to lensing by single stars,” the paper’s co-author Associate Professor Albrow notes. “Dr. Herrera Martin first noticed that there was an unusual shape to the light output from this event, and undertook months of computational analysis that resulted in the conclusion that this event was due to a star with a low-mass planet.”