Last week's data release from Kepler appears to have temporarily
overwhelmed both professional and amateur exoplanet enthusiasts.
After the initial flurry of basic overview posts on the Kepler
data, I noticed a conspicuous hush fall over many of my favorite
astronomy blogs, presumably caused by their authors turning en
masse to parse the new treasure trove. The list of more than
1200 candidate planets will likely yield more than a thousand
actual confirmed worlds once culled of false positives. One
system, Kepler-11, contains six confirmed transiting planets,
and another system, KOI 157, has five candidates. Eight systems
have been found with four candidate planets, along with 45
triple-planet and 115 double-planet systems. It's a lot to
digest, and only represents the first four months of data from a
3.5-year mission. Fortunately, the incapacitating shock of the
breadth and depth of the new dataset seems to be wearing off,
and researchers are beginning to reveal some of their initial
explorations. In particu