Posthuman Blues

Amateur Team Finds an Extrasolar Planet

An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, using simple off-the-shelf equipment to trawl the skies for planets outside our solar system, has hauled in its first "catch."

The astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Corona Borealis.

I don't anticipate any shortage of extrasolar planets for at least the next, say, few thousand years.