Most Intersting Exoplanets

I absolutely love these little slideshow countdowns.
Click here for the Exoplanet countdown.

The most interesting one to me, is number 1 on the list...
Gliese 581

Gliese 581 C marked a milestone in the search for worlds beyond our solar system. It is the smallest exoplanet ever detected, and the first to lie within the habitable zone of its parent star, thus raising the possibility that its surface could sustain liquid water, or even life. It is 50 percent bigger and 5 times more massive than Earth.

Since we have no other life to compare alien life to, except our own, it's reasonable that we should search for "Earth-like" planets first.

But who knows? Maybe these other planets contain life systems that we do not understand, simply because we only understand what is on Earth.

The second most intersting, to me was...
Upsilon Andromeda b

Upsilon Andromeda b is tidally locked to its sun like the Moon is to Earth, so one side of the planet is always facing its star. This setup creates one of the largest temperature differences astronomers have ever seen on an exoplanet. One side of the planet is always hot as lava, while the other is chilled possibly below freezing.

I imagine on this one, there has to be a "just right" space somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. However, it seems doubtful that anything could possibly exist in this perfect spot.


What do you guys think about our discoveries of other worlds?

I find the free floaters to be an interesting case:

There are known exoplanets that have one, two and even three suns. But one bizarre class of planet-sized objects has no suns at all, and instead floats untethered through space. Called “planemos,” the objects are similar to, but smaller than, brown dwarfs, failed stars too small to achieve stellar ignition.

www.space.com...

That old one seems pretty interesting as well and it's amazing at the time it formed.

The oldest known planet is a primeval world 12.7 billion years old that formed more than 8 billion years before Earth and only 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery suggested planets are very common in the universe and raised the prospect that life began far sooner than most scientists ever imagined.

www.space.com...

Funny that we say only Two billions years after the big bang.


I mean, just trying to wrap my brain around that amount of time is hard enough. But to credit it as a small amount of time is even harder.

Like the Hitchikers Guide says, the universe is really, really big and old.