So it doesn’t really take a long exposure to get a good picture of them. I’m guessing the exposure was too short for other, fainter stars to show up.

I do have to say: it might seem in astronomy circles like cosmology is taking up the limelight. From my view outside though, cosmology is a much-needed promotion of the value of considering the stars, and is entirely complimentary to astronomy. In other words, more consideration of cosmology brings more consideration of astronomy, from what I see.

And almost anything that gets people thinking of something larger than the latest celebrity news is a good thing in my book.

They’ve already found planets that the Kepler team have missed!

As for stars I’d add to the list; I’ve always had a good feeling about Eta Casseiopeiae (sure, it’s a binary system, but still)… dunno why.

But given the extremity of scale that cosmology operates on, “our place in the universe” shrinks to a rather indistinguishable dot. What I like about the search for habitable planets is that it expands that dot of familiarity outward into our entire galaxy and beyond. The stars would perhaps seem less cold and distant if we knew we weren’t alone. And that’s worth considering when it comes to the necessary evil of prioritizing funding.

Lots of known planet-bearing stars are visible the the naked eye! And, if planets are as prevalent as I think they are, when you look up at the night sky and see a star, chances are there’s something “planetary” around it, albeit perhaps only quite small. But back to the ones we know about for sure… a preponderance of them are most easily seen from the southern hemisphere, it seems, because that’s where a lot of the best observatory sites and equipment are located.

I’d love to be able to go out in my backyard and look at a star that we know has a planet around it. That’s something which would fire my imagination and maybe rekindle my long-dormant interest in astronomy.

Until that point though, yeah, cosmology is way more interesting to me and I absolutely see why it gets more attention.

I talk about this a lot more in the 2009 feature story (http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_long_shot/). One of the big sticking points is that, while stable orbits do exist in the habitable zone, it’s unclear how exactly planet formation would proceed in the first place around this binary-star pair. So there is a chance that Alpha Centauri is orbited only by sand and dust.

Epsilon Eridani, the closest star with a confirmed planet ? It’s only 10ly away. Anything that close just feels like it should generate important information.

Or Gliese 876, with four planets, and about 15ly away ? The discoveries keep popping up on this one, the longer it’s studied.

One thing I’d really love to see is spectroscopy data from exoplanets that would allow detailed analysis of their atmospheres’ composition – I’m certain that kind of data would throw up many fascinating surprises and would give us a far better idea of what planets in general are like. I don’t know how hard it is to get that kind of data, but I bet it’s much easier if the planet is nearby.

In particular, as was originally pointed out by James Lovelock, the atmosphere of the Earth with its biosphere is far from chemical equilibrium, unlike the other worlds in the Solar system. If we could detect that another planet’s atmosphere was far from equilibrium we would know that something very interesting is going on, even if the planet is not in the region generally recognised as “habitable” by life-as-we-know-it. It would suggest (though not prove) that life or something like it can exist in a form chemically very different to that of Earth. To me that’s the kind of surprise we should be looking for.