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.

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.

Maybe in 50 years we can get probes up to 10% light speed.

200-250 years to reach the planet and then another 20 years for the signal to get back (if we can somehow make a signal strong enough).

So 300 years from now our great-great-grandchildren might know (that's 70 years longer than US history).

But we'd actually have to spend some of that war and terrorism industry money on NASA and private investment to accomplish that. Not sure the politicians would ever bother.

"We're left, like the starving donkey equidistant between two bails of hay, unable to decide on what to celebrate" <-- the closest of these things is 20 light years :[

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!"

In the habitable zone 74% of its orbit? Although it sounds great, I'm left skeptical: to support life, wouldn't that need to be 100%?

Posted similar comment directly to the article. Quite pleased with myself for noticing a typo without having to check. It's probably "Gliese 581g" without the extra "4" that the author is referring to in the list of top candidates. It proves the point, though, that this is a hot area of astronomy. I'm no expert, but I was familiar enough with the first exasolar discoveries to notice the typo immediately.

"That's weird! The sky on Cancri 55 f must be out of this world. "

Really, that's the quality of writing from MIT Technology Review?

"The sky on Cancri 55 f must be out of this world."

Arrrgh.

The planet was discovered in April 2005, nothing news.