…roughly one in three stars surveyed showed signs of harboring stony planets, and other researchers performing similar studies said the figure might be more like one in two. And though the 45 planets on the Geneva list are all “star-huggers,” as one astronomer put it, with orbital periods of 2 to 50 days — even Mercury needs nearly three months to circumnavigate the Sun — researchers are confident that other rocky planets remain to be found at Earthier distances from their suns.

Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said astronomers hunt for planets by detecting telltale wobbles they induce in their host stars, a method that selectively nets the too big or too near. Nevertheless, she said, “the fact is, as soon as astronomers started looking for low-mass planets, they found a whole bunch, and that’s a real breakthrough.” Just imagine the orgy of moderation that a more inclusive scan would reveal.

To some theorists, the new results virtually guarantee the existence of other Earthlike worlds.

“Suppose you have a tribe, and the most noticeable members are the warriors, because they’re adventuresome, they roam around, they’re the first to be spotted,” said Douglas N. C. Lin, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “But you know that for every warrior, there’s a family behind the warrior.”

Dr. Lin continued, “Just as you can extrapolate from the warriors you see what the size of the larger population deep in the woods may be, so the presence of these short-period, super Earths implies that there are clusters of other planets farther out.” Potentially pleasant planets at that. “I would imagine that a significant fraction of ordinary Sunlike stars, maybe more than 10 percent, have habitable planets around them,” Dr. Lin said.

Check out the full article here.

–>June 19, 2008 — Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”

The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench informally called “Dodo-Goldilocks” when Phoenix’s Robotic Arm enlarged that trench on June 15, during the 20th Martian day, or sol, since landing. Several were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench early today, on Sol 24.

Also early today, digging in a different trench, the Robotic Arm connected with a hard surface that has scientists excited about the prospect of next uncovering an icy layer.

The Phoenix science team spent Thursday analyzing new images and data successfully returned from the lander earlier in the day.

Studying the initial findings from the new “Snow White 2″ trench, located to the right of “Snow White 1,” Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, co-investigator for the robotic arm, said, “We have dug a trench and uncovered a hard layer at the same depth as the ice layer in our other trench.”

There’s a good post with pics and stuff at Wired’s website.