Old and busted: “Super-earths.” New hotness: “Mega-earths,” or at least that’s the latest news out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). First spotted using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, original estimates gave it a diameter of 18,000 miles, 2.3 times that of Earth. The density, however, is what floored astronomers: After using the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands, they found it to be a whopping 17 times more massive than our home planet.

“We were very surprised when we realized what we had found,” says astronomer Xavier Dumusque of CfA, who led the data analysis and made the discovery. Another researcher dubbed it the “Godzilla of Earths,” adding that the new planet, Kepler 10-c, has implications for possible life.

Scientists didn’t believe such a planet was possible, until now. Previously, they assumed something so large would take on hydrogen gas as it formed and eventually become a Jupiter-like gas giant. For whatever reason, Kepler 10-c was able to buck the trend, and in doing so raises even more questions for how it’s possible that it did so.

Astronomers date the Kepler 10 system to about 11 billion years old, only 3 billion years after the Big Bang. At that time, the universe contained only hydrogen and helium – or so we thought. The elements needed to form rocky masses would have been created in the first generation of stars, and yet Kepler 10-c appears to defy all understanding.

The rest of the system includes a “lava world,” Kepler 10-b orbiting around a Sun-like star in an incredibly fast 20-hour orbit (our Earth takes 365 days to orbit our Sun).

Kepler 10-c’s discovery, along with its apparent age, could have huge implications for our understanding of not just the formation of planets, but life as we know it. After all, similar elements (silicon, iron, etc.) are needed for both.

“Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life,” says CfA researcher Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative.