It isn't, but it is the first true Jupiter analog = very similar to Jupiter in terms of both mass and orbit. That's what the "true analog" means. A planet not much more massive than Jupiter, similar orbital distance and a circular orbit. None of the previously found planets are as good candidates, as they either orbit closer or have eccentric orbits. I can't see what's so frustrating about that. This system or the ones you listed may be habitable, or not. The main point about this discovery is that now we are starting to find Jovian planets that are no different from the ones in our Solar System.

But it has very eccentric orbit which means strong weather changes.

Let's keep speculation at minimum, I created this thread for actual discoveries. This bulletin board has a whole forum devoted to extraterrestrial life.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Why are you only taking everything from human perespective?
That orbit may be a blessing for a moon with no axial tilt.
And read; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Cygni_Bb#_note-4

Because terrestrial life is the only kind of life we know of.

Good point.

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Honestly speaking, it's not terribly interesting to discuss about speculative life on a speculative moon. Please don't hijack this thread, speculations belong elsewhere.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Ok, I will only post an answer;
Evolution can teach life great things, see extremophiles.
And conditions on hypothetical moon/s of 16 Cygni Bb or HD 132406 b are not nearly as bad as some extremophiles can stand.
That we humans do not like hot steam batch or being in cold climate does not mean that some unicellular or multicellular equivalent of Strain 121 or psychrophiles do also.
I mean, that evolutionary pressure can force microbes to adept and when the conditions are planetwide eventually evolve, bacame multicellular, land dwelling, sapient, civilised...

IMHO the reason for what there are almost none higher extremophiles on Earth it is because there is almost biome that is good for them.
Imagine, if you was a hot acidic lake dweller, how you will get from one lake to another?
But if entire ocean was hot and acidis, you can have a lot of space and food, and so these spieces might have even a civilization!
There is no reason that extremophilic life will be stunted on the level of terdigrades or blind inverberates if it has enough biome.

Accurate Spitzer infrared radius measurement for the hot Neptune GJ 436b

Turns out the planet is a true "hot Neptune" with a hydrogen envelope instead of a some sort of ocean planet speculated.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Hubble Space Telescope times-series photometry of the planetary transit of HD189733: no moon, no rings, starspots

Well, nobody really expected them to exist as any orbit would be unstable so close to the star. The planet was detected transiting huge starspots, which is very cool.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

The Not-So-Bloated Exoplanet HAT-P-1b

When the planet was announced, it was said to represent a new kind of planet because it was so large. That was annoying because such planets were in fact already known (including HD 209458 b, "Osiris", the first-known transiting planet). Even more, turns out the planet is not so inflated. Its radius is "only" 1.20 times that of Jupiter.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Wow, it must really be evaporating fast!

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Space.com: How Solar Systems are Organized:

So, the non-discovery is not bad news, nor we can't conclusively say that such planets don't exist.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Only Earth sized moons were disproven.
There still could be smaller moons close to the planet.
If 51 Pegasi, which is less massive than Jupiter and on similar orbit has a hill sphere of around 410000 km, then this giant may have an inventory of some asteroid moons

So it will be basically hotter brother of Neptune in our Sol system; even apparence will be almost the same because that planet is too hot for watery or acidic clouds but too cold for sodium haze or silicate clouds so the planet is blue.
Clarified Neptunian

Here is an article from the latest issue of Science News on exoplanets, and particularly about using transits to study them.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Planets with Four Parents? Spitzer Finds Evidence for Strange Stellar Family

HD 98800 is a quadruple star system where two tight pairs of stars orbit each other at slightly further than the average distance of Pluto. One of the pairs have two belts of dust around it at approximate distances of 1.5-2 AU and 5.9 AU.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

I hope it proves correct. What a sight those inhabits would have?

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Sunny?

Only dust belts have been discovered, not actual planets. It is unclear if they've actually formed in that system but that seems conceivable.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

A new transiting planet:
*HAT-P-3b: A Heavy-Element Rich Planet Transiting a K Dwarf Star

No further information available.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

More transiting planets to be announced:
*HAT-P-4b, XO-4b, and TrES-4 (the largest and least dense planet known)

No doubt we shall hear more about them soon.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

A true Jupiter analogue, as I understood it, wasn't limited by size, but by orbital distance. It also had to be the innermost gas giant. Epistellar migration kinda eliminated the need for a large sentry giant clearing the debris.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Well, I wouldn't call a ten Jupiter mass planet in a Jupiter-like orbit "a true Jupiter analog", but on the other hand it is much more so than a 1 M_J planet in a torch orbit, for example. This one resembles Jupiter both in orbital and physical properties (given that its orbit is not nearly perpendicular to our line of sight which would make it much more massive).

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Here's the data and the preprint. Mass 0.61 M_J, radius 0.89 R_J.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

*ChaHa8 b, 16-20 Jupiter mass RV companion orbiting the brown dwarf candidate ChaHa8 (preprint, data)

Looks more like a small brown dwarf than a planet, but a mass in the planetary regime cannot be ruled out.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Nice to see these photometric searches producing more and more results. I remember reading somewhere (maybe it was oklo.org but it could have been a paper) that initial estimates were wildly optimistic, with some people expecting tens or even a couple of hundred planets in a relatively short timespan.
So anyone knows what happened? Improved instruments, people became better at reducing their data, more telescope time for follow up, or is it just that the groups are catching up on their previous candidates?

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"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

AFAIK there is a serious shortage of money, scientists and telescope time. In addition, distinguishing planetary candidates from false positives (eclipsing binaries, blends etc.) is more difficult than expected, the atmosphere has been noisier than predicted and the noise has been found to be correlated, whatever that means.

Of course, after a promising candidate has been found it has to be confirmed using the Doppler method. The SuperWASP project has published dozens of good candidates, but apparently they are still to be confirmed.

I wonder how computationally expensive finding candidates from the data is. Because searching signals from a large amount of data is a problem where @home projects excel.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Via Universe Today: Planet Orbiting a Giant Red Star Discovered with Hobby-Eberly Telescope

The planet was discovered by a team led by Alex Wolszczan, who discovered the discoverer of the first extrasolar planets around the pulsar PSR 1257+12 in 1992. This is the first discovery of the team, so congratulations to them.

Frustratingly, the article does not mention the star's name, but it must be HD 17092 which makes this somewhat old news. The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia entry was updated last time in the early May.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

See also this Bad Astronomy blog entry.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

New Scientist Space: Largest known exoplanet puzzles astronomers

The star it orbits is hotter and brighter than the Sun, but the planet is still far more puffed up than theory predicts.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

(NewScientist? Eww. Are they trustworthy? I can't forget their reporting puddles on the side of a Martian crater wall.)

How about, instead, a Lowell Observatory press release? Largest Transiting Extrasolar Planet Found Around A Distant Star

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Um, I was going to find the original press release but forgot. Thanks.

Usually New Scientist has got the facts right but sometimes they do screw up. The article I linked is all right.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

My intent is to give NewScientist a hard time, not you. Their Mars-puddle blunder was so great I think they need a few more minutes in the penalty box.

Back to interesting extrasolar planets...

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The following is a link to an article that discuss 51Pegus’ close orbiting planet. The planet in question is estimated to be roughly ½ the size of Jupiter, with an orbit that is approximately one sixth the distance from Mercury to the sun. (See the scaled drawing that is included in the article.)

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/51peg.html

The question I have is: What mechanism allows a gaseous planet to form in this close orbit?