Astronomers have now confirmed the existence of 277 planets in other solar systems. In just six months, a European team found ten new exoplanets, as they are called, using the SuperWASP system, a technology that monitors thousands of stars for transits of planets across the star's disk.
Another team has found the youngest planet yet, a world possibly only 100,000 years old and still emerging from the gas and dust disk of its birth.
So far, all the exoplanets are gas giants, but astronomers are confident that improved technology and search methods will yield rocky worlds like Earth shortly. Couple that with the list of worlds in our Solar System that could possibly harbor life, and the case for life beyond Earth strengthens steadily.
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