Rocky planet discovered!

This is exciting stuff! We've just confirmed that Corot-7b has both a mass and diameter similar to our own (in astronomical terms). Why is this so keen?

First, we have never found such a planet. Most exoplanets are enormous - like, several times the size of Jupiter, enormous. This means that we can detect them through gravitational microlensing. If you're curious what that is, Aron McCart allowed me to post a brilliant paper on it on my blog that really is worth the read. Microlensing is almost the only game in town, though recently we've detected a planet by Astrometry. The only other considerable game in town as far as planetary detection goes is the transit method, but that one requires a fair amount of luck in order to work, in that from our plane of view the planet must pass in front of the star in order for us to detect the star dimming as a result. Thankfully, we got lucky.

It should be noted, as always, that prayer did not lend us this discovery - nor did any holy book talk about this planet or the means to construct even the crudest telescope. Instead, the collective intelligence of humanity has provided us with the means to look 500 light-years away (1 light-year is about 6 trillion miles) and see a speck of dust similar to the one we live on. Another point for science...is anybody still keeping track?

Second, the existence of such a planet has several implications about how prevalent such planets are, which puts us one step closer to discovering microbial life (or maybe developed life) elsewhere (though I, and most cosmologists from what I gather, already believe the evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is plenty of developed life elsewhere in the universe). Although, life is not going to be found on Corot-7b.

Why is that? Because it orbits so close to its parent star that it completes an orbit in about 20 hours - the rock is hot, hot, hot. This also has some interesting implications for our theories of solar system development, though we'd need to find some other rocky planets orbiting tightly with their parent stars in order to really incorporate that tendency into our models.

When the James Webb Telescope goes up, we should be in for a wave of new information that will prompt revisions to our current ideas and the development of entirely new models. I can't wait!!!