The confirmed existence of dozens (if not hundreds) of exoplanets has raised a renewed interest in questions about life itself. Several of the planets we’ve discovered do posses orbits within the habitable zones of their various parent stars. The habitable zone of a star is defined as the distance from that star in which water can exist in a liquid state, and for earth-like conditions to prevail. Most stars with habitable zones are similar in numerous ways to our sun. They are spectrographically and morphologically similar. They’re non-variable stars. There are problems with any proposed search for life on exoplanets: the first exoplanets discovered are gaseous worlds, more like Juipter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune. Their overt size alone is what allowed their discovery in the first place. Life as we know it, cannot possibly exist in what environments such worlds harbor. Of course, this doesn’t mean that such worlds cannot support life of any sort: it simply means it could be life of an order we cannot recognize. In recent years, smaller exoplanets have been discovered. Nearly all of them are somewhat larger than Earth itself, and quite a few of them are probably more carbonaceous than anything else. A number of “silicate” or “iron” planets have been either discovered, or theorized. A small number of such worlds exist within the habitable zones of their parent stars…but we don’t really know that much about them. What we do know is that many of them are rather hot, and though it’s unconfirmed, a handful of them may actually possess liquid water. To date, no “Earth-Type” planets have been discovered with moons circling them, or with magnetospheres; most such planets are too small to observe accurately (given contemporary observational abilities) but this is likely to change in the upcoming years. * This image was inspired by a brief tutorial I’d sent to a good friend here on Renderosity. I’d offered to present a “quick trick” for creating believable star-fields, and as I wrote instructions, I opened the Gimp and made sure to simply write down every step that I took. As I didn’t go into the creation of planets or nebular clouds, only the background stars in this image are native to that tutorial accompaniment. I couldn’t stop with nothing more than a star-field, and so I opened two photographs (one of the alley behind my maternal grandparents’ former home, and one of a CTA bus turnaround in front of that house. The bus turnaround is largely vacant, now…but it makes interesting cloud patterns.) The rings encircling the bus-turnaround planet are simply really complicated circles I drew and fiddled around with. I got tired of using the “spiral” distortion trick available with most photo-editing/photo-distorting programs (spirals make uneven planetary rings) and so I decided to go old-school and draw stuff by hand…um…I mean…by mouse. This image is the end result. I’m still in serious need of catching up with comments and viewing, but I hope that things do settle down soon. In the meantime, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.