Trickle of Planet Discoveries Becomes a Flood

To me this is exciting. It just makes it more real that there are many earths out there.


Link

The ultimate goal, say many planet hunters, is to find Earth-like planets, or those with similar masses, orbits and rocky compositions to Earth. And beyond finding the physical Earth-like attributes would be to find life. So far no "Earths" have been identified, though observatories are coming online with the sensitivity to detect small objects that orbit far from their host stars, as our planet does.

yeah love the exoplanet missions were on the very brink of finding earth size planets.

i expect 1 from CoRoTs first long (3 months) run which is underway now. Although the first ones will be around red dwarf stars still very exciting.

Might have to wait a few more years until the first earth sized planet around a star like our sun is found. Kepler mission will definitley deliver that for us by 2012. (if they exist- which i think they do )



[edit on 13-6-2007 by yeti101]

Great stuff, i cannot wait until they can properly image these distant planets (check out the New Worlds Imager mission link at the bottom of this reply) also the second link is a supposed photograph of a large exoplanet in a distant orbit around it's star, there has been some dispute over the image though so if it grabs your attention do a little research on it.

"In its most advanced form, the New Worlds Imager would be able to capture actual pictures of planets as far away as 100 light-years, showing oceans, continents, polar caps and cloud banks,"

www.astrobio.net...

and the supposed image of the exoplanet:
www.universetoday.com...