Worlds Enough and Time

The results from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft have been all over the blogosphere today. For me, the most impressive numbers were in the first paragraph of the paper (PDF):

Our current best estimates of the intrinsic frequencies of planetary candidates, after correcting for geometric and sensitivity biases, are 6% for Earth-size candidates, 7% for super-Earth size candidates, 17% for Neptune-size candidates, and 4% for Jupiter-size candidates.

These are early findings and I expect they'll change quite a lot as more observations are made. Still,

whoa.