Astronomers Discover Potentially Earthlike Planet Orbiting Binary Star

This is one of those stories that makes my internal 12 year-old want to post the following comment and my 42 year-old too in awe to stop it:

"Cool!"

Sensationalist headline. Actually just a candidate for supporting liquid water (and then only for some of it's fairly elliptic orbit).

And it's pretty damn big, so not likely to be a rock, more like a gas giant (If it _doesn't _ have a large gaseous atmosphere it would I think be the biggest rock planet ever discovered.)

So "habitable exo-planet" is stretching things............... a lot.

Yeah well it's an unfortunate by-product of a) research institutions feeling the pressure to spin their output in a way which is consumer-friendly and b) the publishing industry turning that spin into an absurd attention-grabbing headline.

A red dwarf from 1000 au would only look like a moderately bright star, won't it?

On the other hand, it would be close enough that if aliens inhabited, they could send a probe with present-day human level of technology. That is, the nearby star would serve as a stepping stone and an excuse to bridge the gap to interstellar space. Compare it to our Alpha Centauri, which lies just shy of 300K au, a relatively costly cosmic barrier to entry.

But for our neighbourhood, there is still the possibility of a brown dwarf or Jupiter-sized world lurking in the depths of our Oort cloud. Alternative destinations are 500-750au which would be good spots to place a telescope (exploiting the Sun as a gravitational lens) http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10123 . You need intermediary objectives to make interstellar exploration a more realizable goal.

It doesn't need to be 100% if the atmosphere of the planet could keep enough heat for the remaining 26% of the time, which is entirely likely.

This find is awesome, but it's not what the headline describes. The planet is no "ExoEarth". It's a fantasticly cool exoplanet that could very probably support life that vaguely resembles life on Earth (not humans, though).