Is super-earth some term with meaning here, or are they purely using it as a headline? I don't imagine with orbits closer to their host start than mercury and mass 7-8 times that of the earth that they are actually all that earth-like.
> The archetypical planets of our Solar System --- Jupiter the gas giant, Neptune the "ice" giant, and Earth the terrestrial planet --- represent an incomplete inventory of the planet types in our galaxy. We are locally impoverished in "super-Earths," the broad category of planets intermediate in size and mass between Earth and Neptune.
Under different circumstances, particularly if there were no Jupiter, we might expect a metal-poor, water-rich rocky planet in the system, larger in volume and more massive than Earth.
Jupiter has had a huge influence on the solar system, and if that mass were not concentrated there, it would have to be somewhere. The H and He would probably have blown away, but the silicaceous, carbonaceous, hydric, and metallic materials might have contributed to terrestrial planets.
If you squashed all the moons of Jupiter together along with the entire asteroid belt, you almost get a wetter, less dense Mars. Add the 5% of Jupiter that isn't light gases, and you get about 1*10^26 kg, which is about 16 times the mass of Earth.
So if the light gases blew away instead of forming Jupiter, and the remaining mass formed asteroids that combined via capture and collision, the solar system could have had a super-Earth. But instead, Jupiter sucked down most of that mass and put the rest into stable orbits around itself.