Giant planet orbits star 9,000 light-yrs away

www.zeenews.com...

It's funny it's right in our back yard.

6 trillion x 9,000 miles pretty close

That's not what's remarkable about the planet, after all Epsilon Eridani b is closer, at only 10.9 lightyears away. Much much closer.

No, this discovery is remarkable because they detected a terrestrial (rocky) planet 13 times the size of Earth at such a distance. Comparitively, Epsilon Eridani b is a gas giant about 86% the size of Jupiter. Plus it's much closer therefore supposedly eaasier to detect.

This is news because they've come up with a way to detect planets at such a great distance. 9000 light years is not pretty close. That's like in a different arm of the Galaxy.

the planet discovered was not a gas giant and that makes it a great discovery but it was bigger then the recently discoverd planet which was 5.5 times bigger then earth.

The biggest thing about this is how common this planet hunter said these types of planets are. 35 % of all stars have planets like this according to this person. If that turns out to be right, how common are planets in the habitable zone? 35% of 100 billion stars in our very own galaxy means that there are 35 billion stars with some sort of rocky planet in orbit. Even if the percentage of systems that has rocky planets in the stars habitable zone is 1% that still means that there are on average 1 billion stars in our own galaxy with rocky planets within the zone. That is a huge (though fictional) number. Even a fraction of that would be millions.