Exciting find annouced today... the smallest extrasolar planet yet. Not quite home, since it's still 5.5 times as big as Earth and 2.6 AU away from its sun. We're not quite there yet, but we're getting better at it.

Here's the NSF story. And CNN's story... "New science finds Earth-ish planet," if you feel like reading a story with the word "Earth-ish" in its front page headline. The actual story calls it "Earth-like" (and now it's all fixed, but trust me that it said "Earth-ish" a couple hours ago), but how do professionals get away with that, unless they were just being cutesy? Not really a cutesy story, dude. Serious scientific coolness.

During the NASA Academy at Ames 2005, I did some educational outreach work for the Kepler mission which is planned to launch in summer of 2008. That mission's goals include getting an idea of how many of these little habitable Earth-y (I can say this because I'm not supposed to be a reliable national news source; I'm a student with a blog, and this is my standard) planets are out there. We're expecting a decent number.

In completely unrelated news, she's officially Jolie.