A team of astronomers have successfully used the 2.5-meter Nordic Optical Telescope to measure the passing of a super-Earth in front of its Sun-like star. 55 Cancri e is 50 light years from us. It is the innermost of the five planets in its system and twice the size of Earth with 8 times the mass. The planets daytime temperature can reach 1700 degrees Celsius, which is more than 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.

It is not the most hospitable or “Earth-like” of the Earth-like planets. They important thing, however, is that all previous data on the planet came from space based telescopes.

“Our observations show that we can detect the transits of small planets around Sun-like stars using ground-based telescopes. This is especially important because upcoming space missions such as TESS and PLATO should find many small planets around bright stars,” says Dr. Ernst de Mooij in a statement. De Mooij, of Queen’s University Belfast, UK, is the lead author of the study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will launch in 2017 and survey more than half-a-million stars for exoplanets.The European Space Agency’s Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars mission (PLATO) will begin in 2024 with similar objectives. The ability to monitor planets from numerous ground based telescopes compliments these missions. Astronomers will be able to choose stars for the satellites to have a closer look at and take a closer look at objects detected by the satellites.

“It’s remarkable what we can do by pushing the limits of existing telescopes and instruments, despite the complications posed by the Earth’s own turbulent atmosphere. Observations like these are paving the way as we strive towards searching for signs of life on alien planets from afar. Remote sensing across tens of light-years isn’t easy, but it can be done with the right technique and a bit of ingenuity,” said York University Professor Ray Jayawardhana, the study’s co-author and de Mooij’s former postdoctoral supervisor.

The team plans to continue its observations of 55 Cancri and will next look for the presence of water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere.

According to NASA’s Exoplanet Archive there are currently 1,773 confirmed exoplanets with more than 4,000 other possible planets awaiting confirmation. Those numbers represent only a tiny fraction of the planets that are likely to exist. A study released in November, 2013 estimated that there are 8.8 billion habitable, Earth sized planets in our galaxy alone.