Finding new planets is becoming a popular cottage industry for several groups of astronomers, and it's hard to keep track of every new planet they find. Just for the record, as of September 8, 2004, there are 127 known planets outside of our Solar System.But recently, three different teams of astronomers announced discoveries which were more significant than the usual, 'ho-hum' detection of a new planet. Not only are we finding smaller and smaller planets, as we get better at it, but it seems that we may have also found an entirely new kind of planet, which some astronomers are calling a "Super-Earth."Let's start with the basics: so far, almost all of the exoplanets we know about ("exo" means "outside", indicating that these planets are outside our solar system) have been detected by watching their parent stars wobble.

Whenever two objects orbit around each other, they actually both orbit around their combined center of mass. It's a little weird to think about it, but it's not entirely correct to say that the Earth orbits the Sun.Both the Earth and the Sun orbit around their shared center of mass, which is hard to notice because the Sun is so much more massive than the Earth (about 300,000 times more massive, actually).

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So that means everything sort of orbits each other?

Find more planets! :ld

W/ all these gas giants being discovered ... one thing to keep a look out for is one in a similiar orbit distance as Earth. I'd be very pessimistic on finding life on the gas planet itself, but that'd put any moons (which would obviously be terrestrial in nature) in a great position to develop favorable environments.

I find the idea of a planet having the same structure as Earth yet the same general size of the standard gas planet very peculiar. Prior to extra-terrestrial planet discoveries, it was basically agreed that Earth was at or close to the limit a non-stellar body could expand in volume or surface area w/out beginning to pull in masses of lighter molecules (H, He, etc) ... which would ultimately lead to having a large gaseous envelope. Having said that, it wouldn't surprise me ... I'm already becoming more and more convinced that our solar system is unique. There are so many solar systems being found that possess at least 1 gas giant w/ an orbit close to the parent star ... contrary to our largely divided terrestrial/gas giant system, w/ gas giants being further out.

In space, you also have to keep in mind that random events aren't ... well, all that random. Therefore it should come to no surprise that there's very little consistency. Maybe life on Earth got started w/ the help of something very random and highly unlikely to happen again at any given place or time, therefore making us special. We simply don't know. But before being able to come up w/ a good idea on solar system and planet evolution in general, we first need to find out what's the norm and what's not. Any theories on how our solar system evolved obviously don't apply to all these other new-found ones. Just my 2 pennies -- MM

Just imagine in 50 or 100 years what we will have found out there, this is only the begining, the future hold so much potential for our race to further itself and discover so much!