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Fascinating, what scientific research produces for us.

New worlds, for example.

Since 1995 astronomers have detected more than 300 planets orbiting other stars. Detected, not seen.

The stars are very far away. The distances to the stars are measured in light-years: that’s the distance that light travels in a year. Light speed in the vacuum of space is some 186,000 miles per second. Fastest thing in the universe. That means a light-year comes out to a little over 6 trillion miles.

Think of it this way: The distance between Earth and the sun is about 93 million miles. Imagine a map on which that distance is shrunk to one inch. At that scale, Alpha Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, would be 4.3 miles away.

If distances in our solar system can be thought of as inches, distances between the stars are miles.

Distance isn’t the only problem when it comes to finding planets orbiting other stars. Planets are small and dim. Stars are big and bright. Finding planets at interstellar distances is like trying to find a firefly fluttering around a searchlight. The firefly’s glow is lost in the glare of the big lamp.

But astronomers are ingenious. They’ve developed tools that can detect an extrasolar planet by the tiny gravitational tug the planet exerts on its parent star.

This means that the easiest planets to detect are those that are very massive and are orbiting very close to their star. And that’s just what the astronomers have found. For the most part they’ve detected planets that are bigger than Jupiter, the giant of our own solar system at 11 times Earth’s diameter. But while Jupiter orbits five times farther away from the sun than Earth does, most of the extrasolar planets that have been discovered orbit scorchingly close to their stars.

So, although more than 300 extrasolar planets have been found, most of them are much bigger and much hotter than Earth. Unlikely abodes for our kind of life, although some weird forms of alien life may exist on them.

But what about Earth-like worlds? Astronomers’ tools are constantly getting better, and just this month a team from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland reported finding not one, not two, but three planets just a little bigger than Earth orbiting around a sun-like star 42 light-years from us.

The newly-discovered planets are 4.2, 6.8 and 9.4 times more massive than Earth. Still pretty heavy, but much smaller than Jupiter, which is almost 318 times more massive than Earth.

The three nearly-Earth-sized planets orbit very close to their star, though, much closer than airless, heat-scorched Mercury orbits our sun.

They’re not much like Earth, but we’re getting closer. Later this year NASA plans to launch the Kepler spacecraft, which will be able to spot Earth-sized planets orbiting stars out to about 1,000 light-years’ distance.

Once we find new Earths, will we find other living creatures on them? Perhaps even intelligent creatures?

Stay tuned. The hunt goes on.

Meanwhile, a different kind of scientific hunt has turned up a fascinating surprise.

Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are the oldest poems in Western literature. They were originally composed nearly 3,000 years ago, and tell the saga of the Trojan War and Odysseus’ long, painful travels to return to Ithaca and his wife and home after Troy was conquered. (Ulysses is the Romanized version of the hero’s name.)

In the “Odyssey,” Homer tells of a sudden darkness that fell upon Ithaca when the sun was blotted out, shortly before Odysseus confronts the louts who — thinking Odysseus long dead — have been besieging his home and demanding that his wife, Penelope, choose one of them as her new husband.

Blotting out the sun sounded suspiciously like a solar eclipse to Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo Magnasco of New York City’s Rockefeller University. They carefully studied other astronomical references in the “Odyssey,” including mentions of the planets Mercury and Venus, the appearance of the new moon, and of the constellations Boötes and the Pleiades.

From this information, and with the help of a powerful new astronomical software program, they matched the patterns mentioned in the saga and found that they come together only once every 2,000 years. From this they computed that Odysseus returned to his homeland of Ithaca on April 16, 1178 B.C.

Scholars have long debated whether the events described in Homer’s epics were based on actual events or not. Archeologists have uncovered the ruins of Troy: the city did really exist. In fact, it was destroyed and rebuilt many times over the course of many centuries.

Was brave, resourceful, daring Odysseus a real, breathing man? Did he actually storm the walls of Troy and then spend 10 years struggling across the seas to get home to Ithaca? Did Penelope faithfully wait for him, fending off the suitors who demanded her hand in marriage until her husband finally returned — so aged that practically no one recognized him — and slaughtered his wife’s would-be suitors?

Homer’s epics are such terrific stories that they still thrill readers and audiences nearly three millennia after they were first composed. Are they based on facts? Wow!

And now for something completely different.

For decades, technologists have manufactured diamond films by depositing a hot vapor of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms on a surface. The process is usually begun by vaporizing a mixture such as ethanol and water.

Now, a team, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Querétero, have found that ordinary tequila works just as well. White tequila, fermented from leaves of the blue agave plant, has the right concentration of hydrogen and oxygen to guide the carbon atoms in it to form a film of diamond, instead of ordinary soot.

Japanese, Russian and American researchers have reported using sake, vodka or whiskey to produce diamond films. The Mexicans used tequila. To each his own.

Olé!

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of nearly 120 books. His latest is “Laugh Lines,” a collection of humorous science-fiction stories. Bova’s Web site address is: www.benbova.com.