… 50 new exoplanets, of which 16 are superearths, of which one is in the (rather hot inner edge of the) theoretical habitable zone* of its primary.

It’s the HARPS/ESO team this time ‘round.

I will pull out (probably predictably) a particular comment on what this should be telling us about instrument/technique priorities for the decades to come:

Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, cautions that a lot of assumptions would have to hold for the planets to be habitable. It is not known whether the new planet, HD 85512 b, is rocky or not. Kaltenegger says it will also be important to build telescopes capable of discerning whether atmospheres in exoplanets like HD 85512 b have chemical constituents such as methane, oxygen and water. “We have great targets now,” she says.

That. Again. What she said. Etc…

Though I’ll also broaden that (again) to say: whether or not we find anything quite so pulse-quickeningly obvious and obviously downright epochal as copious quantities of free oxygen where we figure there really shouldn’t be without something biological regularly cutting it loose off of stuff to which it should otherwise be sticking, it would still just be awfully nice to be able to see some atmospheres at distances and resolutions like that, next, anyway. As I think it’s pretty clear it’s doable (if hard), and that there may well be many, many more curiosities we might discover, in so doing.

*Mostly parenthetically: I’m using the phrasing every popular and technical source has been doing for this one, but I can’t entirely let it pass without mentioning I’m having vague misnomer anxiety about ‘habitable zone’ again, for various reasons. Overtones of parochial, etc…

… I mean… ‘habitable’? Seems off. Point one: as if we’re ever likely to inhabit it, or at least any time remotely soon, and that always seems to be what folk not thinking too clearly about this come out with when they hear this phrase, go fig. Point two: like we really know that well anything else is even going to express the same preferences re environments that work for some variety of metabolism, current I suspect narrow notions of what works for biological chemistries aside…

But ‘zone in which liquid water is reasonably likely on the surface of the average rocky body’ is a mite more of a mouthful, fair ‘nough.