NASA Telescope Reveals Largest Batch of Earth-Si...

BRILLIANT!!! Great find, Freddy! I've been hip-deep in baby dragons with my schoolwork, so I haven't been able to do much searching for things of this nature. I'm chuffed that you brought it to my attention. Thanks.

It's an expression that I picked up somewhere that I've been using to indicate being very busy. I rather like it, actually.

I've not quite reached the quarter-way mark yet. Still a while to go.

It is, but it will likely take me 3 years to complete, because I'm not taking "full time" semesters.

Um... Snowy? Shouldn't that be Venus, Earth and Mars? If Neptune were in the habitable zone, either we'd be a moon of that planet (if Neptune were where Venus is) due to long term gravitational forces, or Jupiter would also be in the habitable zone, giving us 5 planets in there. And that would make for a HUGE habitable zone. Just sayin'

Dave, my bad. Venus is what I meant. Have changed it.

8pla, the colour of the star gives its temperature. The orbital periods for the planets are known, this gives their distance from the star. The habitable zone (or Goldilocks zone) is where water is likely to be liquid. Too close and there would be no water, too far and it would be frozen.

Venus is in our sun's habitable zone but due to having an atmosphere of mainly carbon dioxide, there is no chance of liquid water. This is only partly to do with how close it is. There are many other factors.
Earth, as we all know, is not too hot and not too cold. But the sun being a bit hotter and our atmosphere having way more carbon dioxide; would make life more of a challenge.
Mars is too small to keep up a good magnetosphere so the sun has stripped it of it's atmosphere (about 7mBar compared to our 1000mBar). In its early days it may well have had a life supporting atmosphere.

Knowing anything about the atmospheres of exoplanets is beyond our tech, for now. If we can detect oxygen in an exoplanet's atmosphere, this would be a good indicator that like exists on that planet. But you'll never know unless you visit or communicate with intelligent life. 4 light years is doable with generation ships but 40 light years is too far but now we're venturing into SciFi.