Space-based telescopes have been used to find Earth-like planets outside our solar system, but a telescope based on the ground in La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, was able to see 55 Cancri e, according to Space.com.
55 Cancri e is twice the size of Earth and has a "parent star," like the Earth has its sun. The island telescope, Nordic, was the first to observe a "super-Earth-sized" planet that orbits a sun-like star in this manner.
A space-based telescope first saw 55 Cancri e in 2004. The planet has been determined to be about twice the size of Earth (16,000 miles in diameter). The size and proximity to a sun makes it similar to planets that could support life, according to Space.com, although the planet is not habitable.
The Nordic telescope might have been able to see the planet because of the "transit method," in which dips in a star's brightness are observed when a planet passes in front of it. This method has aided space-based telescopes to study other super-Earths or Earth-like exoplanets (planets that orbits a star other than our sun).
"We expect these surveys to find so many nearby terrestrial worlds that space telescopes simply won't be able to follow up on all of them. Future ground-based instrumentation will be key, and this study shows it can be done," said Mercedes Lopez-Morales, co-author of the new research and a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
