Artists’s impression of one of more than 50 new exoplanets found by HARPS: the rocky super-Earth HD 85512 b. Credit: ESO

Today 50 new exoplanets where announced by the HARPS team. 16 of them are identified as Super-Earths. One of the Super-Earths is thought to orbit right on the edge of the habitable zone of its star.

ESO Webste:

team has found that about 40% of stars similar to the Sun have at least one planet lighter than Saturn

This is great news and goes to show how fast the field of exoplanet research is moving.

“In the coming ten to twenty years we should have the first list of potentially habitable planets in the Sun’s neighbourhood. Making such a list is essential before future experiments can search for possible spectroscopic signatures of life in the exoplanet atmospheres,”  Michel Mayor, discoverer of the first-ever exoplanet around a normal star in 1995.

More info here.