Scientists find Potentially Habitable Planet

[SmileOfTheShadow]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100929/sc_afp/usastronomyplanet_20100929210707

[Zoltan]

Fantastic!

Here's an article on the "Bad Astronomy" blog, giving some more context to the discovery and some moderation in the speculations that is sure to happen in the media.

[Jonas]

Fantastic!

Here's an article on the "Bad Astronomy" blog, giving some more context to the discovery and some moderation in the speculations that is sure to happen in the media.

Thanks for the link! This is the part of the article that was the most interesting to me:

But perhaps the most interesting and exciting aspect of all this is what it implies. The Milky Way galaxy is composed of about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000 light years across. The fact that we found a planet that is even anything like the Earth at all orbiting another star only 20 light years away makes me extremely optimistic that earthlike planets are everywhere in our galaxy. 20 light years is practically in our lap compared to the vast size of our galaxy, so statistically speaking, it seems very likely itÆs not unique. I donÆt want to extrapolate from a data set of two (us and them), but if this is typical, there could be millions of such planets in the galaxy. Millions.

So we donÆt know if this planet is all that much like Earth ù the surface gravity may be quite high if itÆs dense and small, for example, or it may not have any air, or it may have a thick atmosphere like Venus ù but what itÆs telling us is that smaller, lower mass planets at the right distance from their star for liquid water are almost certainly common in the galaxy.

And thatÆs big enough news for me.