Secondly I see little evidence of an actual forming planet, there is an equal amount of evidence that the dust is falling off the planet.

Thirdly and perhaps most damning to the evidence of a forming planet is that in 2009 a planetery formation study was done by Erik Asphaug of Univeristy of California Santa Cruz and found:
“Not only must turbulence be low, but the gas must go away before the growing planetesimals spiral in….”

The first link states that gas is present, and Asphaugs study shows that it can not be if planetesimals are to form.

I realize I’m about two months late on this, but I only recently heard about it. Sorry for the delay

Really? OK…

The section of the disc hole behind the star from our view seems roughly half as wide as the section in front of it. This is due to perspective.

If the planet were just in front of the star from our view, and aligned (which by the way it isn’t), then you would have a point.

However, in the picture we are seeing the whole system from an elevated position.

And in any case, with the current perspective, if we align the planet behind the star (where the disc hole is about half as wide as in front of the star) then wouldn’t it look about half its apparent front-of-the-star size?

That would still be much bigger than the star in the picture.

And the planet is at most at a 15º angle with the diametre of the perpendicular, from our view.

So either the planet is bigger than the star, or the perspective in the picture is wrong. Fail

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/news/herschel20111020.html#

The Herschel space telescope finds oceans-worth of water in the disk of the nearby star, TW Hydrae.

&

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/possible-planets.html

Spiral arms are found not in a glaxy but in the protoplanetary disk around pointing to possible planets for the young “sun-like” (?) star SAO 206462.

Plus :

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20111019.html

A comet storm is detected around Eta Corvi, an F2 Procyonese dwarf star. (Click on my name here for wiki-page on Eta Corvi & its multiple proplyds.)

No, perspective. The Moon looks as big as the Sun from Earth when in fact its much smaller by about 400 times. Pluto looks bigger than the Sun by metaphorical miles – when you view it from the surface of Charon. A train on the horizon looks smaller than a moth flying a few centimeters from you. It’s all depends on your point of view!

Still- a place like this LOOKS bright and shiny and new, til you realize that its hundreds of light years away, and by now the neighborhood has gone to the dogs.

http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/683/1/L63

&

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1719

HD 154345b is one example of such a Jupiter twin.

whilst this online article :

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3834/earth-planets-common-outer-space

notes that :

“Of about 100 typical Sun-like stars, one or two have planets the size of Jupiter, roughly six have a planet the size of Neptune, and about 12 have super-Earths between three and 10 Earth masses,” said astronomer and lead author Andrew Howard, from the University of California at Berkeley. “If we extrapolate down to Earth-size planets – between one-half and two times the mass of Earth – we predict that you’d find about 23 for every 100 stars.”

Which is a positive albeit still uncertain sign too. Not sure if those rough estimate numbers have changed much since that was written but Kepler and CoROT are certanly finding stacks more exoplanets and taking the total of known exoplanets far higher quite quickly.

That does make it seem like lower mass exoplanets are more common than higher mass ones which matches nicely the way lower mass stars (&, for that matter, lower mass animals) are much more numerous than higher mass ones so, yeah, its not all Superjovians out there!

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/03/07/theoretically-alpha-centauri-should-have-planets/

for why we think Alpha Cen has rocky worlds. I guess we’ll hear more on that if or when such worlds are found.

See :

http://exoplanetology.blogspot.com/2009/03/exogazing-pollux-b.html

for more on Pollux b.

Plus see :

http://www.solstation.com/stars2/47uma.htm

which notes if you scroll down far enough :

In 2003, astronomers at the University of Texas at Arlington performed refined calculations to determine that the habitable zone around 47 Ursae Majoris, where an inner rocky planet (with suitable mass and atmospheric gas composition and density) can have liquid water on its surface, lies between 1.05 and 1.83 AUs of the star. They found that the development of an Earth-like planet in the inner portion of this zone may survive disruption from the development of known planetary candidates planet b and c. If a small, rocky planet can develop without the interference of planet b, then stable orbits appear to be possible in the inner portion of the habitable zone (Noble et al, 2002, in pdf; and Jones and Sleep, 2003). Subsequent analysis suggests that the habitability of such an inner rocky planet would be boosted if the star was “relatively young” at six or less billion years old and has a “relatively small stellar luminosity”

We don’t yet know of such an exoplanet but this could be a good bet for one of the nearest habitabile exoplanets. Behind only Alpha Centauri the very nearest star of all – well, almost, depending on whether Proxima Cen is really Alpha Cen C or independent anyhow.

Pretty sure there are a few other Jupiter analogues – Jovians in Jovian type orbits – that are known too.

Woohoo! I love this stuff!! I mean, I love all astronomy, but you have to admit that the planet-finding research is pretty high up on the “to Boldly Go” awesomeness scale.

I feel the same way too. Exoplanets are also my favourite area of astronomical discovery and it never ceases to amaze and delight me how we’re finding and what we’re finding out there in the Black.

I do have an offhanded question – it seems like many of the planetary systems we find are quite extreme by our standards. Jupiter is a darn big planet, but it seems like every other exoplanet is a super-Jupiter. And many of them are as far out as our kuiper belt or closer then Mercury. Is our solar system just plain weird? Or does it simply seem that way to me because I’m being, er, Heliocentric?

Well, yes and no.

We *have* discovered a lot of strange exoplanetary systems and quite a number of superjovian worlds verging on brown dwarf status but we’ve also discovered a lot of exo-Saturns, exo-Neptunes and “super-Earth” type planets (which I’d describe more as Super-Venuses” given the majority are far hotter and more hostile than here.)too.

It isn’t just Superjovians or HotJupiters or Eccentric Orbiters and we know of systems with many gas giants that are smaller than Jupiter mass~wise. There’s at least a couple of systems that somewhat resemble our own including 47 Ursae Majoris and in a way, weirdly enough, PSR 1257+12.

As (#22.) HvP has pointed out its also partly at least a reflection of our technology and our selection sample is baised by what worlds are easiest to find. Detecting an earth-like planet in an earth-like orbit is something that’s still so staggeringly difficult and time taking to accomplish it’s probably no surprise it hasn’t been done yet.

The new exoplanets do tell us that many systems are very different to our own – that a lot of suns have Hot Jupiters and Eccentric Orbiters which renders them very unlikely to have habitable worlds in them.

OTOH, it shows us there are a huge variety and number of exoplanets out there orbiting almost every type of star and that Earths while perhaps rarer than we hoped for, are also likely to still be around in reasonably mind-blowing numbers. IOW, planets and planetary systems are relatively common and abundant.

We have reason to think that Alpha Centauri may well have rocky worlds, we know that systems like 47 Ursae Majoris exist which do have room for smaller planets in “Goldilocks” places, we know now-ornage giant star Pollux hosts a superjovian in a circular orbit which could mean it once hosted habitable worlds closer in when it was a somewhat more sun-like (or maybe more Procyon-like) star.

So there are both signs for hope and concern habitable earth-like planet~wise and we still have an awful lot more to discover before we can say much more than that. Insufficient data really still but were getting ever closer and ever more complete in our understanding of these new-found worlds of other stars.

Well, the techniques we currently have are best at identifying the most extreme systems, because those are the easiest to spot quickly. Big planets produce a stronger pull on their stars, and close orbiting planets create a faster wobble that requires very little time to identify. To spot the planets in the middle requires more sensitivity and/or more time to pin down the orbital period.

So it may be that these super systems are actually more common, or it may be instrumentation bias skewing the results.