SpaceToday.net has a good summary of the recently discovered extra solar planet massing only five times as much as ours.

My recommendation for the planet finders is to start looking for wobbles on the wobbles of the super massive planet orbits to see if they can find smaller planets or Moons. Or wobbles on cold binary stars that circle near the hab zone of hotter primaries that may also turn up lower mass planets.

Even if we never directly detect low mass planets, big hab zone planets may be like Jupiter or Saturn and have lots of moons, some of which have comfortable gravity and an atmosphere.

Ken Silber has a review of what look to be an interesting new book on exobiology.

Ken Silber has a review of what look to be an interesting new book on exobiology.

Ken Silber has a review of what look to be an interesting new book on exobiology.

Jay Manifold has some interesting statistics on the latest spectacular image from Hubble of the Crab Nebula.

Alan Boyle (who is on his way to check out the rocket racing exhibition in New Mexico), talks about advances in adaptive optics, with a spectacular picture of a sunspot.

Check out this spectacular picture of Hyperion from Cassini. The imaging technology has come a long way since the first Rangers.

USA Today is in favor of the Cylons conquering space. They cite Van Allen. My reply to him is here. For the debate, check out Space Politics.

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.

Alan Boyle has the story.

Cassini has been delivering spectacular results, and we can continue to look forward to much more (barring technical disaster, or a collision with a ring particle). I remember when I was in college, and we were just starting to anticipate the pictures that would be coming in from Voyager in a few years. Today, I suspect that most young people take this kind of imagery for granted. It’s just part of the background tapestry of twenty-first century life, like powerful desktop computers, iPods, and affordable air fares.