Is a methane atmosphere that unusual? I was pretty sure that they had found evidence of extra solar planets with atmospheres similar to Titan. If it can happen in our solar system it probably is not the unusual?
There is an interesting planet in the Gliese 581 planetary system that I have been reading about in the Goldilocks zone.
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But perhaps the most interesting and exciting aspect of all this is what it implies. The Milky Way galaxy is composed of about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000 light years across. The fact that we found a planet that is even anything like the Earth at all orbiting another star only 20 light years away makes me extremely optimistic that earthlike planets are everywhere in our galaxy. 20 light years is practically in our lap compared to the vast size of our galaxy, so statistically speaking, it seems very likely it’s not unique. I don’t want to extrapolate from a data set of two (us and them), but if this is typical, there could be millions of such planets in the galaxy. Millions.
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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...a-nearby-star/
I just find it so $%&*ing mind blowing that in my short lifetime, how much knowledge we have gained. I learned in grade school about the planets in our solar system and they were the only ones known. Today we know of hundreds of planets relatively close to us...