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[Sensei]

We have a better understanding of the principles at work than would say we have no bloody idea what's out there- for starters, when you get enough solid mass together to make a planet, shit be gettin' spherical.

Also good luck getting to your planets guys.

[alway]

Rise! Rise once more to serve your master, oh long dead thread!

Anywho; more exoplanet data released today, info + short summary can be found in the links in the first post.

The juiciest data still won't come for another year or so, simply due to the technique for detecting planets. A planet with the orbital length of the Earth can't be detected until a minimum of 3 passes (3 years) in front of its star (first 2 passes show a candidate, third confirms status as potential exoplanet).

[Fayrik]

Shame it takes so long to find all the stuff out...

Though, I guess the worst part is the whole speed of light thing.
These planets might not even exist anymore, but we don't know because they're tens, if not hundreds of lightyears away.

It's lovely to see that we may not be the only possible water-based life form out there, though!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

As I recall, previous observations have already found one planet in its star's habitable zone, that is terrestrial, and likely has a compostion similar to that of Earth....but its rotation is tidally locked.

[alway]

Yeah, that Gliese one. The exciting thing isn't so much the firsts (although these results include the smallest exoplanets yet found), but the sheer quantity. IIRC, they are monitoring something like 200,000 stars. 1200 planets found using a technique which requires an orbit to be almost perfectly lined up with us, even making the false assumption these are all the planets which will be found, that's a bloody high number of planets. Planets are not only not rare in the cosmos, but seem to be at least as common as the stars they orbit.

[Heron TSG]

I'm just getting in to this kind of thing in Physics, as well as my Astronomy class. I must say, it'd be neat if we could actually visit any of these planets.

[Sensei]

So, how broad is the 'habitable zone' they're using?

[Shade-o]

Between freezing and boiling.