NASA announces new extra-solar discoveries

5 Intriguing Earth-Sized Planets
By Mike Wall
SPACE.com Senior Writer
posted: 26 August 2010
02:17 pm ET
The announcement today of a newfound group of alien planets orbiting a distant star has added another candidate for the growing list of potential Earth-sized worlds beyond our own solar system.
Astronomers still have to confirm the presence of the possible Earth-sized world. But they suspect it has a radius just 1.5 times that of Earth, which would make it the smallest alien planet yet found, if confirmed.

space.com

The exo-planet "zoo" continues to grow. There is now one planet that may have tolerable gravity (though to hot) and a couple that may have liquid water (though too heavy). Like Goldilocks, it's only a matter of time before we find one that's "just right."

Yeah great news! Read it couple weeks ago, posted it here before anyone else and now it's official. They're finding many great things in the heavens, on earth and below.

It's a great time to be alive!

IMHO Unless NASA is being funded by aliens from the Pleiades, maybe we should keep their eyes focused on objects in our solar system or possibly objects outside which are having an effect upon our star.

As corrupt and fallen as we are, the whole planet is probably under inter-galactic quarantine anyway. Would you want your kids playing here?

reply to post by gotredeemed


Learning about other solar systems is a crucial way of studying our own. As recently as 30 years ago, ours was the only planetary system we had as a model. All of our theories of planetary formations were based on generalizations made from a single example. Bode's Law? Pure coincidence, apparently. Accreation disk? Not even possible in some of the systems we've found recently. Eventually it might be possible to classify different types of systems based on their dynamics and conjectured formation. It might then be possible to find correlations between different types of systems and their spectrographic "fingerprint." At that point, we might be able to look at any given star and tell what its associated planetary system looks like. The possibilities become endless at that point.