Earth 2?

OK, it's a little warm -- between 1,000 and 1,500 Celsius on a typical day.  And it's not a whole lot bigger than our home planet. In fact, it's just about as solid and as dense as Earth, with a 20-hour day.

Still, scientists are calling CoRoT-7b a "super Earth."

This particular planet isn't the first outside our solar system to be identified. It is, however, the first to be officially measured and "weighed," using "the best exoplanet-hunting device in the world, called a high accuracy radial velocity planet searcher (HARPS) -- which is a spectrograph attached to the European Southern Observatory's telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile." (NewsDaily)

Exoplanetary exploration is an infant science, but it's growing fast. So far, about 330 exoplanets have been discovered outside our own solar system -- though most of the planets, like Saturn and Neptune, are massive gas giants. The discovery of a rocky planet similar in size and makeup to Earth and Mars is an important step toward finding that elusive "Earth 2."

Of course, despite a fair amount of hard searching, we have yet to find much in the way of life on our close neighbor Mars. But we're just in the earliest stages of exploration.

Perhaps the next exoplanet we look at may be looking right back at us.

Photo courtesy of Kevin Heider, via Wikimedia Commons