"...it shouldn’t be neglected that a rocky place with high water content, discovered through a transit of a ‘hot Neptune,’ is an exciting reminder that the essentials for life are likely widespre

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"Scientists taking their first "sniffs of air" from planets outside our solar system are a bit baffled by what they did *not* find: water."

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"Amateur astronomer William Bianco doesn't huddle over a backyard telescope to hunt for undiscovered planets. He logs onto his computer." Three cheers for constructively geeky pastimes!

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"...a Russian Soyuz 2-1b rocket with the European COROT space observatory launched [...] from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. The French-led COROT mission will look for rocky planets around othe

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"Can we expect to find gas giants mixed with small terrestrial worlds around most Sun-like stars? And what about the smaller and far fainter red dwarfs?" Centauri Dreams thinking aloud about

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"Hunting for terrestrial planets is not going to be easy, and even when we start getting images of such worlds, there will be plenty of questions to answer."

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"The COROT space telescope is proceeding smoothly towards its launch in December 2006. Once in orbit, COROT will become the first spacecraft devoted to the search for rocky planets, similar to ou

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Does what it says on the tin. More fascinating deep-space boffinry from Centauri Dreams.

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The name says it all...it will be called the 'Extremely Large Telescope'. Are there awards for prosaic technology names?

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Odds for finding habitable planets may have just improved

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