A New Earth?

I’ve been told by someone at NSF that there may be an announcement today of an extrasolar “earth-like” planet (in terms of mass) at 1 PM. We’ll keep an eye out.

[Update at 11:30 AM EDT]

Here’s a link to a webcast on it, coming up in an hour and a half. The person who notified me of this writes:

“I believe, based on the level of media they’re expecting that it will be an earth-size and mass planet outside of the solar system.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

[Update at 2 PM]

OK, it’s “more earth like than anything previously found,” but still not that earth like. It masses several times as much as the earth, at a distance of only a couple million miles from its star, with a year of only two earth days. Sounds more like a large “Mercury-like” planet.