This Spaceflight Now article discusses the Kepler Orbital Observatory’s discovery of two “smallish” worlds (within a few percentage points of Earth) orbiting a star 1000 light years away. This proves that 1) Kepler can ‘see’ worlds of this size and 2) that such worlds are not radically rare since there are two in the first few dozen discovered.  However both orbit too close to their star for us one’s probably got a surface temp of ~1500 the other a relatively ‘cool’ 800.  Other interesting thing is that the other planets spotted (all way to close to the star) are gas ‘pigmy giants.’