The ink was hardly dry on last week’s report taking NASA to task for being so narrow-minded about what form alien life might take and what conditions it could live in when researchers showed that old-think has some life in it yet, no pun intended. Writing in today's issue of the journal Nature, an international team analyzing data from NASA’s Spitzer telescope, which orbits Earth, announced the first-ever discovery of water on a planet beyond the Sun--and got all excited about how important this is for the question of life beyond Earth.

More than 200 such “extra-solar” planets have been discovered, orbiting other stars. The water is actually in the planet’s atmosphere rather than sloshing around on its surface (the astronomers deduced this from how the planet absorbs starlight when it passes in front of its star, in the constellation Vulpecula—“the Fox”—64 light years away; only water vapor would produce the spectrum the Spitzer telescope captured).

The planet has the less-than-inspiring name HD 189733b, and although it is far from habitable (it is a giant gas bag, like Saturn, and 30 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, which makes it broiling hot: 1,340 degrees F.) the fact that it contains water suggests that the stuff might not all that rare in the galaxy.