Imagine trying to see a mosquito disappearing behind a 400-Watt streetlamp, not at the next street corner or a few blocks away, but 1,000 kilometers away. That's equivalent to what we're trying to do to detect the planet's eclipse in the HD 209458 system.

I would say the majority of astronomers believe there is life elsewhere, and the best place to find it would be on a planet that has conditions like the Earth.

We were able to rule out Earth-sized planets in some of the orbits where theorists believed they might be found.

We expected that there might be Earth-mass planets here because the planet we know about is weird. It's too big for its mass and one of the best theories to explain that was that it was being puffed out by the tidal influence of a Earth-mass planet in a nearby orbit. Unfortunately that does not work.

That run tightened the game up. We were trying to speed up the game rather than slow it down. We weren't setting up and shooting the ball on one pass.

I was trying to win the game.