That’s fascinating news! It seems our cosmic neighborhood might be even more crowded with diverse worlds than we previously imagined.
The recent discovery indicates that super-Earth exoplanets, which are more massive than Earth but lighter than ice giants like Neptune and Uranus, could be significantly more common than scientists initially thought. This is particularly interesting because:

• Wider Orbits: The research suggests that these super-Earths are not just confined to orbits close to their stars (like those detected by the Kepler space telescope) but can also exist in wider orbits, even as far out as where Jupiter and Saturn are in our solar system.
• Microlensing Technique: This finding was made possible by using the gravitational microlensing technique, which is particularly sensitive to detecting planets on these wider orbits. This method observes the bending of light from a background star as a star with a planet passes in front of it.
• Implications for Habitability: This abundance of super-Earths in a wider range of orbital distances has implications for the potential habitability of these planets. Depending on their atmospheric properties, planets in wider orbits around their stars could still potentially support liquid water on their surfaces.
• Planet Formation Theories: These observations are also helping scientists refine their theories about how planetary systems form and evolve. The distribution of super-Earths at different orbital distances provides valuable data for these models.
  It’s exciting to think that there could be a multitude of these intriguing super-Earths lurking out there, waiting to be discovered and potentially holding clues about the diversity of planetary systems and the possibility of life beyond our own. This definitely opens up new avenues for exoplanet research and the search for habitable worlds!

The new discoveries

The discovery came after a small extrasolar planet, or “exoplanet,” in a wide orbit around its star was discovered, courtesy of a gravitational “microlensing” event designated OGLE-2016-BLG-0007. This event indicated the exoplanet had a planet-to-star mass ratio that roughly doubles the Earth-sun mass ratio.

“We found a small planet in an orbit similar to Saturn’s. This planet is part of a larger sample that shows super-Earth planets between the orbits of Earth and Saturn are abundant,” team member Jennifer Yee of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian told Space.com. “The abundance of super-Earths was a surprise.”

Yee explained that scientists previously knew from data delivered by the Kepler space telescope mission that super-Earths are common around other stars, but only within a distance from their respective stars equivalent to the distance between Earth and the sun. That expected distance is represented by one astronomical unit (au). 

This new work, however, shows that super-Earths are also common at larger distances from their host stars, in this case around 10 au (or 10 times the distance between our planet and the sun).

Previously, there were only upper limits on the numbers of super-Earths [in wide orbits], and there was a suggestion that they might not exist at all,” Yee continued.

Habitable zones and planet formation

When factoring in this super-Earth data, the team calculated that there should be around 0.35 super-Earth planets per star on wide Jupiter-like orbits. Yee explained that the overall distribution of planetary mass ratios could reflect the specifics of planet formation processes. 

“Specifically, the distribution suggests that the planets can be separated into two populations, one of super-Earths and Neptunes and one of more massive gas giant planets,” Yee added. The team suspects this division in populations reflects the differences in formation processes between terrestrial planets and massive gas giant worlds.

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