A huge "super-Earth" with an extreme climate that results in it being habitable for only part of its orbit has been discovered orbiting a star 2,472 light years away. And the most remarkable thing is, it was discovered without even being directly detected.

The discovery of the exoplanet, a super-Earth called Kepler-735c, is all down to something called transit timing variations, or TTVs for short.

Let's set the scene. One of the primary ways of discovering exoplanets is by looking for when they transit, or pass in front of, their star. As they do so, they block a small fraction of that star's light, and, based on the size of this dip in stellar brightness, we can determine how large the transiting planet must be. Indeed, this was how the most successful exoplanet hunter so far, NASA's Ke

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