Everybody's all abuzz about this picture:
This may be the first image of a planet around a sun-like star. May be, mind-- it looks likely, but there are still a lot of caveats. If it is a planet, and not a dim background star, it's got about eight times the mass of Jupiter, and is orbiting at eleven times the radius of Neptune's orbit. Those are a little hard to explain.
Still, isn't it cool to be living in the future?
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"... isn't it cool to be living in the future?"
In a weird sense, this is also like living in the past. I feel as if I'm in an old Analog story, perhaps written by "Hal Clement." Super-Earth oddly far from sun-like star. Intelligent beings on that planet. Life, but not life as we know it. Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry absolutely textbook accurate. Oddball biology that, in context, makes sense. Beings have concept of the universe slightly different from our at the edges, but mostly the same. Now we know that planet exists. Next chapter is when we go there, but from their point of view. We and they jointly figure out the planetological anomaly.
That's what it feels like to me, anyway. Fortunately, I've been explaining the "habitable zone" to my students...
Wow, that is really cool, including that bit about living in the future. ^_^