Top Scientific Discoveries

In October, 2007, British scientists identified three new planets outside our own Solar System as part of an ongoing search for Earth-like exoplanets called the Wide Area Search for Planets, or WASP.

While meeting the new neighbors can be fun, this discovery shouldn’t be cause for planning that big “Welcome to the ‘Hood” party just yet. As luck would have it, the new planets are about the size of Jupiter and orbit so close to their suns that their surface temperature reaches 2,000 C.

Still, the search for rocks a bit more friendly to carbon-based life forms continues, and those same scientists speculate that Earth-like planets may exist in those same systems.

That’s just one of the 10 notable scientific discoveries included in Time magazine’s end-of-year list. Others include advances in building a viable human heart valve and the discovery of hundreds of news species.

Here’s are the Top 5:

1. Stem Cell Breakthroughs

2. Human Mapped

3. Brightest Supernova Recorded

4. Hundreds of New Species

5. Building a Human Heart Valve

To see more about these and other discoveries, and to view a slideshow, visit Time.