A Sky Full of Earths

From the current issue of the Marina Times, my Science article:

An artist’s conception of Kepler-22b, a planet in the
habitable zone of its star. It is the first planet that NASA’s
Kepler mission has confirmed to orbit in a star’s
 habitable zone, but scientists are now finding potentially
 habitable planets by the dozens. photo: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

SCIENCE
A Sky Full of Earths
By John Zipperer
December 2012

Stroll along Crissy Field at night and look up into the sky, and you will see lots of stars. But because of the interference of other lights in the metro area, you won’t see nearly as many stars as someone in the countryside would see.  

For scientists who have been studying stars for years – even decades – the analogous situation for finding planets around those stars is more dire. For millennia, there was widespread doubt ...

Read the entire article...

I Told You So: A Whole Buncha Planets Found

I love it when reality proves to be in agreement with my assumptions.

The European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile announced the discovery of 32 new planets outside of the solar system. The exciting part of it is that they provide evidence of many more planets of smaller size than much of what has been discovered previously.

Notes BBC News:

The discovery is exciting because it suggests that low-mass planets could be numerous in our galaxy. "From [our] results, we know now that at least 40% of solar-type stars have low-mass planets. This is really important because it means that low-mass planets are everywhere, basically," explained Stephane Udry from Geneva University, Switzerland. "What's very interesting is that models are predicting them, and we are finding them; and furthermore the models are predicting even more lower-mass planets like the Earth."

More info from ESO, or watch ESO's "video press release" below: