Not much of an amateur myself but i've got a space in my heart for, um, space. BTW, Pluto = comet??? I mean, i knew it wasn't technically a planet anymore, but... And anyway, isn't 'exoplanet' a little too cumbersome a term for a post-heliocentric culture? Shouldn't we just be calling 'ours' endoplanets instead, and skip adding the exo prefix to every new planet we come across outside our system (I'm just guessing, but there's probably a few, or a lot), since we're being so exclusive anyhow? Just a thought. Anyway, I 'd be interested to know anyone's educated guess what sort of weather we'd expect from our hefty friend (1.5x the size- wonder what sort of gravity we're pulling there. the article says 15 earth mass, so i'm guessing it's a bit more than 9.8 m/sec squared). I'd like to hope, depending on how nice Gliese 581 b is, that the nicer the weather the sooner we'd get to developing faster means of interplanetary, not to mention interstellar travel. I mean, if there's nowhere nice to go, what's really the point?.

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