Vega may have Earth-like planets!! For those of you who don't know, Vega is close, really close, only 25.3 ly away and appears as one of the brightest stars in the sky. It's about three and a half times the size of the sun and about 75 times brighter. A part of the constallation Lyra, and one point of the Summer Triangle (with Altair and Deneb the other two), Vega is visible high in the western sky at sunset sinking to set in the northwest around 10 PM. It will rise above the northeastern horizon just before sunrise around 5:30 am if you're awake and want to take another look. (plug for Sarry Night.)
It's been known for a couple of decades that Vega had a dusty halo but recent data gathered by the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array at the James Clerk Maxwell radio telescope in Hawaii, when pushed through sophisticated computer models, suggests that there's opportunity for Earth-like planets to have formed inside of the relatively distant orbit of a Neptune-sized gas giant plowing through Vega's dusty disk.
We're still a few years away from the next generation of telescopes that will allow us a much ore accurate picture of extra-solar planets. Today's extra-solar planet finders are using indirect observation methods but in 2012 we will see the launch of the Terrestrial Planet Finder which will provide direct observation of extra-solar planets as small as Earth. This direct method will allow observers to measure the spectrum of light from a planet's atmosphere giving strong indications of its makeup including our first real shot at observing the hallmarks of extra-terrestrial life.
