Here we go: the Earth-sized exoplanet discovery snowball begins. Two "Earths" around one star.

As I said a couple of weeks ago when Kepler 22b was announced - expect a snowball of similar announcements.

Now we have Kepler 20 - one star, with a bunch of planets, including Kepler 20e and 20f - both Earth sized. But this time they aren't in the "Goldilocks zone" there are far too close and therefore too hot.

The methodology for detecting these planets is obviously getting better. And remember that Kepler is just staring at one small section of the sky. If we had more telescopes studying other areas, these discoveries would be a daily announcement.

But one thing is for sure - I want a star drive!

UPDATE January 2012:

Further research has underlined just how populous exoplanets are likely to be in our galaxy. They found that there are likely to be 1.6 planets per star. With some 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, that's 1.6 billion-odd planets out there! Not so rare now are we?