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.

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