Planet

First possibly Earthlike extrasolar planet found.

The search for extra-solar planets has become so fine-tuned that observers are now beginning to find smaller, rocky bodies.

Credit fathero9.

Philip Plait at his Bad Astronomy Blog is positively gushing:

But remember, Gliese 581 is cooler than the Sun, so at this distance the planet would actually be very temperate: models show it would be between 0 and 40 Celsius! If that doesn’t grab you, then consider this:

That is warm enough for water to be a liquid.

So what we may have here is a terrestrial planet with liquid water on its surface.

Link.

The barely-spoken part is, of course, the elephant in the room: life. When we find it it will rock the world.

The Eagle Nebula

I think that one of the greatest indictments against the Abrahamic religions is just how parochial they are.

When their sacred texts were first laid down, planet Earth was it - the only game in town, the only arena. So the gods took interest, and intervened, sometimes hugely and often cruelly.

But now we know that little Earth is just one planet next to one of the one hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, again one of billions.

Biology happened here without teleology; it was the result of random processes constrained by natural law. It's reasonable to conclude that it most probably did, and will, happen elsewhere.

There's lots of fuss (Dynamics of Cats, at ScienceBlogs) over this. It's fun watching in real time, via the Internets tubes, as people smarter than I try to figure it all out.