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Terrestrial (Rocky) Planet Discovered
KilgoryTrout writes "A 'super-Earth' planet was identified in orbit around mu Arae, a star 50 light years away. It orbits at 2 AUs and surface gravity is 14gs. Two gas giants have been detected in orbit about the star. Space.com's article suggests that it is a failed gas giant's rocky core."
Well, you also have nuts claiming that civilizations are thriving on the Moon, Mars, comets, etc as we speak. Nuts turning a hill into a monumental statue of a face, and sand dunes into a canyon sized glass worm. No matter what happens, we can assume there will be people whose preachings deviate from the obvious. It's best just to ignore them.
Boy, my astrophysics is bad! After reading through other comments I see that the planet would have to be the same size with that mass for my weight prediction to be accurate. I think someone calculated a little over 2g's so one could safely stand on the surface and not be crushed into a puddle of biology.
Come on, I love Astronomy, but observation is the only method to gather information outside of our solar system in astronomy (well, except for radiation studies), and this "world" is so far away, how the hell do they know it's a gas giant core? We're talking about extreme conjecture here. No photos, no probes, just some evidence that it exists by means of tracking positions of its' star (that's typically how these far-away planets are "found"; observations of SOMETHING pulling agaisnt a star and affecting it's motion).
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I think that life is quite likely (almost certain) to exist somewhere other than earth. Multi-cellular-life is significantly (orders of magnitude) less likely. Intelligent-multi-cellular-life significantly less likely again.