Intergalactic Planetary

The good news:  astronomers have discovered a pretty decent sized planet out there with what they believe is liquid water on it out in another nearby solar system.  Bad news:  the only reason the water would be liquid would be the massive temperature and pressure on the surface, making it pretty much uninhabitable for us.

While the planet probably has too thick of an atmosphere and is too hot to support life similar to that found on Earth, the discovery is being heralded as a major breakthrough in humanity's search for life on other planets.

"The big excitement is that we have found a watery world orbiting a very nearby and very small star," said David Charbonneau, a Harvard professor of astronomy and lead author of an article on the discovery, which appeared this week in the journal Nature.

The planet, named GJ 1214b, is 2.7 times as large as Earth and orbits a star much smaller and less luminous than our sun. That's significant, Charbonneau said, because for many years, astronomers assumed that planets only would be found orbiting stars that are similar in size to the sun.

Because of that assumption, researchers didn't spend much time looking for planets circling small stars, he said. The discovery of this "watery world" helps debunk the notion that Earth-like planets could form only in conditions similar to those in our solar system.

So in a very real way by redefining the boundaries of size that a planet may have water on, this is pretty big news.  Perhaps there's a super-Earth sized planet out there that's just a bit further out from a star than this one and hey, maybe there's stuff on it.  Who knows.