Some juicy numbers to start the new year with, courtesy of the Kepler planet-sniffing satellite, which is doing a great job, exceeding expectations and deserves a raise. Recent data sez Kep has found reasonable evidence for no less than 461 new planets. Some of ’em orbit within their stars’ watery-microbial-maybe-more habitable zone. So that’s nice.

(….Hey, look! A chart! Thanks, NASA.)

But even more Sagan-licious: the data indicates that virtually every sun-like star in our galaxy has an Earth-size planet careening around it. Doing the math in my head (yeah. right.) that totals up to roughly 17 billion-with-a-B Earth-twins out there just waiting for us to discover and shortly thereafter begin bombarding with reality TV shows and used car commercials. Some of these earthy orbs orbit tighter than our Mercury, so could be a little too hot (but it’s a dry hot) for life. On the other hand, lots of the host stars are red dwarfs, so burn much cooler than Sol, so life is back in the equation. Presto.

Final analysis:  potential exoplanets chalked up on the big board so far?  2,740, orbiting 2,036 stars.

These, my friends, are champagne-popping figures in any earther’s book. Happy New Year, and keep watchin’ the skies….

Now then, the premise of the article that prompted this post is a bit of a stretch. A bit of a gi-normous not-bloody-likely stretch, actually, even for an exo-life-presumer like me. But I had to post it primarily because it describes its content as the result of “geo-boffinry.” Boffins, as you UK types have known for years, are authorities, scientists, those-who-know-more-than-the-rest-of-us. But the term is seldom glimpsed here in the U.S., possibly having to do with its nineteenth-century cachet of dank museum basement offices and musty taxidermy displays, but hey, I’m not judging… This latest boffination claims that some superearths, those giant exo-planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, might generate pressures that create liquid metal which might create a magnetic shield. This shielding might then protect a life form that might have evolved on said mega-world. Yeah, lotsa mights in there… Anyway, for those of you interested in the geo-boffinic details:

“A geo-boffinry study has found that super-Earths could have oceans of liquid metal and magnetic shields that protect life on their surfaces.”

“It is often thought that a planetary magnetic field protects life on a planet’s surface from harmful space radiation, like cosmic rays,” geophysicist Stewart McWilliams, with the Carnegie Institution and Howard University, told Discovery News.

“What we find is that magnetic fields may exist on more super-Earth planets than expected, resulting from the transformation of the planet’s rocks to metals in the deep interior. This could create new environments for life in the universe.”

The full article is at the UK’s Register. Happy boffinizing.