As the poster at arstechnia says this is fascinating stuff and i hope it remains so for a very long time.
Astronomers find a star system where a red giant appears to have swallowed two Jupiter-like planets, then later spit out their cores, which now orbit as small, rocky planets.
via Remains of gas giants, swallowed by red giant star, now orbit as small planets.
Astronomers have spotted a cloud of gas with three times the mass of the Earth on a near-collision course with the Milky Way\s central black hole.
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.’
This World and Others 