As you may have read previously, a stalwart DC Comics superhero will soon be reintroduced as a gay character. Rumors about this particular superhero's identity have been a-swirling over the last week, and now io9 has the details directly from the author who's penning this new origin. Some spoilers ahead.

In fifteen years, astronomers have detected just over 500 planets orbiting other stars. Now, after less than two years in orbit, the Kepler telescope has more than tripled that figure, discovering more than 1,200 possible new worlds. Even better, at least 54 of them are in their star's habitable zone, and five of these …

The newly-discovered Kepler-10b is, in terms of size, the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered, and the first completely confirmed discovery of a rocky planet around another star. This is very good news for the hunt for Earth's twin.

Friday's Smallville, "Luthor," featured that old superheroic stalwart: the evil alternate dimension doppelganger. Clark's pandimensional twin, Clark "Ultraman" Luthor, was so evil that he had carnal relations with his adopted sister, Tess. Oh Smallville, you deviant program!

Orbiting a nearby red dwarf star called Gliese 581 are 6 planets. One of them is a rocky ball, bigger than Earth, in the "habitable zone" where water is liquid and temperatures are human-friendly. It's possible we could live there.

As the fall TV season starts up, shows are resolving their agonizing summer cliffhangers — but for some unlucky shows, that resolution never arrived. Here are the most frustrating "cancel-hangers," cliffhanger endings for shows that got cancelled too soon.

Scientists have discovered what may be the first exoplanet to mirror Earth's climate, which may be a major breakthrough in the study of planets in other solar systems.

Rings of debris from shattered asteroids and Earth-like planets orbit many white dwarf stars - their remains testimony to how common Earth-like bodies really are in space.

Even though the entire industry spent the last week sunning themselves (and by "sunning themselves," I mean, "slowly roasting themselves in large windowless rooms talking to nerds like me"), your local comic book store will still find itself with a full selection of brand new books tomorrow as regular as clockwork. But,…