A scientometric prediction of the discovery of the first potentially habitable planet with a mass similar to Earth.
BACKGROUND
The search for a habitable extrasolar planet has long interested scientists, but only recently have the tools become available to search for such planets. In the past decades, the number of known extrasolar planets has ballooned into the hundreds, and with it, the expectation that the discovery of the first Earth-like extrasolar planet is not far off.


RESULTS
Here, we develop a novel metric of habitability for discovered planets and use this to arrive at a prediction for when the first habitable planet will be discovered. Using a bootstrap analysis of currently discovered exoplanets, we predict the discovery of the first Earth-like planet to be announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest date being early May 2011.


CONCLUSIONS
Our predictions, using only the properties of previously discovered exoplanets, accord well with external estimates for the discovery of the first potentially habitable extrasolar planet and highlight the the usefulness of predictive scientometric techniques to understand the pace of scientific discovery in many fields.
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. arbesman@hcp.med.harvard.edu
Samuel
S
Arbesman
Gregory
G
Laughlin
D018534:Earth, Planet; D016083:Planets; D011336:Probability