An international team of astronomers, including researchers from Ohio State University, has discovered a frozen, rocky planet about twice the mass of Earth in a binary star system. It’s orbiting one of the stars at close to the same distance as Earth is from the sun.

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from Ohio State University, has discovered a frozen, rocky planet about twice the mass of Earth in a binary star system.

It’s orbiting one of the stars at close to the same distance as Earth is from the sun. Since that star is significantly smaller than our sun, the newly discovered planet is much colder than Earth. Its estimated temperature is negative 352 degrees Fahrenheit.

Previous observations show only gas giant planets were found in binary star systems, so experts believed that terrestrial planets didn’t form in those types of solar systems.

Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University is quoted as saying: “This greatly expands the potential locations to discover habitable planets in the future. Half the stars in the galaxy are in binary systems. We had no idea if Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits could even form in these systems.”

The solar system is around three thousand light years away from Earth, and was studied using the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment telescope.

This study is also the first successful test of a new method called gravitational microlensing, that is used for locating planets and determining their distance from the closest star.