Since astronomers identified the first planet outside our solar system 13 years ago, however, that idea has become downright quaint. Because now, according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, there are 277 confirmed "extrasolar" planets, and quite a few more on the list of those suspected but not yet confirmed.

This explosion in planetary discoveries is taking place at such warp speed that even those most intimately involved are often amazed -- especially because their ultimate goal is nothing less than finding life elsewhere in the universe.

"This is an absolutely astounding time for this field," said Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who last week reported finding the first "exoplanet" to have organic methane in its atmosphere.

"We're not only finding them rapidly and in great variety, but we're starting to characterize them -- their mass and orbits, the properties of their atmospheres, measurements of day and night, dynamics of their winds," he said after the methane discovery was released last week...

Considerably more powerful hardware is also on the way. NASA's Kepler satellite, which is designed to find distant planets as they transit in front of their stars, is supposed to be launched next spring and is expected to locate hundreds or thousands of new planets. The James Webb Space Telescope, a high-powered Hubble successor that will be able to find atmospheric molecules in rocky exoplanets rather than only in gas giants, is scheduled for launch in 2013.