First Rockey Planet Outside Solar System Found Advancing Hunt for Earth-like Body

The search for a habitable exoplanet is one of the holy grails in astronomy and today the CoRoT space mission announced the discovery of the only the fifth known terrestrial planet in the Universe to add to the known planets of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth, [ESA].

Exo-planet CoRoT-7b is now being described as the first rocky planet outside our Solar System marking a significant step forward in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. Astronomers and planetary scientists have found 373 exo-planets in alien star systems; and the number of exo-planets discovered expands almost daily now with a growing number of space telescopes.

The COROT and Kepler space telescope missions are designed to find many, many more exo-palnets and perhaps a space telescope will find one or more similar to Earth with an oxygen atmosphere and more or less 1G. More with a Planet Hunting vid and