[cripplecreek]

Somebody needs to explain what “earthlike” means to the writers.

[BenLurkin]

shortens the odds on extraterrestrial life being discovered

What...just because we found this one planet?

There must be billions of others just like it.

[TexasCajun]

Home of short, stinky, bald Liberlings.

...now we know.

[jaz.357]

Wonder if they have any "New Coke"?

I actually liked the stuff.

[VeniVidiVici]

radar sure comes in handy

[dog breath]

The majority of what they find are gas giants, it’s very good that they found a rocky planet. Lots of very bizarre worlds out there, this one is really close to it’s sun, and uninhabitable. Humanity might need a new home someday, if we could ever figure out how to get to it. My only hope for space travel is that there are some things about the universe that have not even occurred to us.

[NonValueAdded]

Dust off the Drake Equation and recalculate for N cause n_e is changing

[Freedom_Fighter_2001]

Does it have a Stargate? Well, does it?

[Dutchboy88]

Paging Tom Cruise...

Your alien mothership is calling.

[Billthedrill]

DIBS!!

[backwoods-engineer]

Here's the problem with extra-terrestrial planet search, with the present state of the art: you're only going to find planets that orbit very close to the host star, and thus are unsuitable for life. That's because present techniques use either occultation (planet blocking light from star) or tidal effects (planet pulls tides on the star as it revolves in its orbit, like moon does to us) to detect planets.

Neither of these techniques is going to find an earthlike planet, which would be a rocky planet of about 0.8 - 3.0 earth masses that is about 100 +/-20 million miles from a G-type yellow or yellow-orange star about the size of our sun. It's just too far from its sun for our present-day techniques to detect its occultation, and any tidal effects would be miniscule.

There may be earthlike planets somewhere, but it's possible we may never know about them until we build very large telescopes on the dark side of the moon. And even then, we may not detect them.

Also, if there are earthlike planets, I tend to agree to with Brownlee and Ward, that such planets are rare and most likely have no life, and if they do, it's just bacterial or plankton-like life.

By the way, I'm not a professional, just an interested amateur scientist.

[LRS]

...which circles a star 500 light years away in the constellation Monoceros, or the Unicorn...

Oh No! Planet Unicorn! My least favorite skits on Red Eye!

[SunkenCiv]

Smallest exoplanet is shown to be a solid, rocky world
ESA | 09/16/09
Posted on 09/16/2009 6:28:15 PM PDT by KevinDavis
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2341600/posts

First Solid Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet
European Southern Observatory | 09/16/2009 | EOS
Posted on 09/20/2009 2:53:01 PM PDT by Dallas59
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2344350/posts

[SunkenCiv]

No ping, just adding to the catalog.

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[Ted Grant]

Open the Iris! Send a MALP through and take a look.