AKIPRESS.COM - Scientists have discovered a new type of huge and rocky alien planet about 560 light-years from Earth.

Dubbed a "mega-Earth," the exoplanet Kepler-10c weighs 17 times as much as Earth and it circles a sunlike star in the constellation Draco. The mega-Earth is rocky and also bigger than "super-Earths," which are a class of planets that are slightly bigger than Earth.

Theorists weren't sure that a world like the newfound exoplanet could exist. Scientists thought that planets of Kepler-10c's size would be gaseous, collecting hydrogen as they grew and turning into Jupiter-like worlds. However, researchers have now found that the newly discovered planet is rocky, Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in a statement announcing the find.

The mega-Earth orbits its parent star once every 45 days. Kepler-10c is probably too close to its star to be hospitable to life, and it isn't the only orbiting the yellow star. Kepler-10 also plays host to a "lava world" called Kepler-10b that is three times the mass of Earth and speeds around its star in a 20-hour orbit.

NASA's Kepler space telescope first spotted Kepler-10c, however, the exoplanet-hunting tool is not able to tell whether an alien world it finds is gaseous or rocky. The new planet's size initially signaled that it fell into the "mini-Neptune" category, meaning it would have a thick envelope of gas covering the planet.