The star in question is about 380 light years away and is less massive than the Sun, at 0.7 Solar masses. It is a K type star, with a temperature of about 5100 K. Kepler had initially identified the star as being a strong candidate for an exoplanet. A follow up conducted by ground based telescopes, using a method called radial velocity, confirmed the existence of the planet, while also obtaining some crucial information about the planet.
This discovery is really interesting, because, we are not sure what the limit of the masses of terrestrial planetary objects is. This is one of the first instances where quite a large planet was found to have a rocky composition. In our Solar System, the largest terrestrial planet is Earth itself. The smallest gas giant (in terms of mass), is the planet Uranus, with about 14.5 Earth masses. For information can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04291, which contains a pre-print of the scientific paper.
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