It's a Small World: Kepler Spacecraft Discovers First Known Earth-Size Exoplanets: Scientific American

It's a Small World: Kepler Spacecraft Discovers First Known Earth-Size Exoplanets: Scientific American

From a related article: The message is simple, says Sara Seager, a planet hunter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the discovery team: Planets abound wherever we look. “We think every star has planets.”

That is consistent with a back-of-the-envelope calculation I made a year ago, http://bit.ly/aprDiM, that was itself backed up 2 weeks later by findings of a team of astronomers from Yale and the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics (http://bit.ly/qU3Qel). In all, living in the era of powerful ground-based and space telescopes is really freakin cool, man!