It seems that Nasa’s Kepler project has had it’s first success in finding a rocky extra-solar planet weighing in at 1.4 times the mass of the Earth.

Wait, it’s unlikely that this fellow is quite like the Earth though as it’s 20 times closer to it’s companion star than Mercury is to our Sun and has an orbit of only .84 of our Earth days! Not very hospitable methinks. An amazing find however and found using the tiny variations in light that Kepler sees as the planet passes in front of the star. Science fiction stuff indeed!

source: NASA