"Planet bonanza hints at worlds similar to our own" Topic

"For planet hunters, this has been a bountiful year. A team of astronomers at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center have used data from NASA's Kepler space telescope to uncover 715 new exoplanets. The newly-verified objects orbit 305 different stars, and therefore include multi-world systems that are reminiscent of the Sun's own planetary family. The announcement of these discoveries was followed by news that Kepler had also found the first Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of its star, Kepler 186f. This is a significant milestone in the task of determining the prevalence of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

These results are showing us that not only are Earth-sized planets common, but so are multi-planet systems containing potentially habitable worlds," notes Jason Rowe, a SETI Institute astronomer who co-lead the study. "Most of the new planets orbit their host star much closer than Mercury, but a few are beginning to bear a similarity to our own solar system."

The deluge of new planets has been intensified by a new analysis scheme called verification by multiplicity. This technique can be applied to many planets at once, allowing the researchers to verify hundreds of new planetary systems in wholesale fashion, rather than teasing them from the Kepler data one-by-one as done in the past. The new technique uses probability arguments based on the recognition that, of the 150,000 stars observed by Kepler, hundreds were found that have multiple planet candidates. On this basis, the researchers are assured that their results are not distorted by binary stars that can mimic a multi-world system. The new discoveries increase the total number of known exoplanets to over 1,700…"
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Amicalement
Armand

There are literally more planets than anybody would know what to do with.

It owuld be an amzing coincidence if there were not any Earth like planets out there.

Both you gentlemen are correct of course but the key word in the report is "verify". So from 99.9% sure to 100%.

We'll get to "verify" eventually. Now, whether we ever get to any of the non-solar planets themselves, that's another matter.