Water found in atmosphere of planet orbiting distant star.

This is a major story if we want to find (or place) life on planets surrounding other stars.

"We know that water vapor exists in the atmospheres of one extrasolar planet and there is good reason to believe that other extrasolar planets contain water vapor,” said Travis Barman, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona who made the discovery.

HD209458b is a world well-known among planet hunters. In 1999, it became the first planet to be directly observed around a normal star outside our solar system and, a few years later, was the first exoplanet confirmed to have oxygen and carbon in its atmosphere.

HD209458b is separated from its star by only about 4 million miles (7 million kilometers)—about 100 times closer than Jupiter is to our sun—and is so hot scientists think about it is losing about 10,000 tons of material every second as vented gas.

So this is not going to be a planet we try to terraform for human life, but it tells us that water, a basic building block of life as we know it, can be found in other star systems.

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In the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence [SETI], the big question is that if there is extraterrestial intelligence out there, why haven't we heard from them yet? This finding increases the likelihood that if extraterrestial intelligence intelligence is out there it has just become more likely with this finding. So why haven't we heard from them?

My bet is that intelligence of the kind we have requires some unlikely evolutions, and so it is extremely unlikely to exist elsewhere. But that is a bet made with very little knowledge of what actually did happen to create Homo Sapiens, and it also begs the question of what future evolutions may occur. We could be an unlikely accident, and we could be an intermediate step to some other form of life that has as little use for us as we do for most insects.

As I say, who knows? No one now, but someone will relatively soon.