Comments - To the Sun-like stars: Life beyond Earth (Financial Times)
To be fair, Kepler is doing a photometric study. It won't be able to use the light of these incredibly dim (relative to their parent star) planets to look for oxygen, the clue that life exists on that world. But it will hopefully achieve the 10^7 contrast ratio for Sun-like stars in the near-infrared (or 10^10 in the visible) needed to identify a planet around a star.
Disclosure: In case you didn't know, I used to work on ground-based detection of low-mass companions to M-dwarfs in the near-Infrared at Palomar. Not nearly as glamorous, but I did find about ten new stars.
Glad to see astro made it in the financial pages. :)
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