A statistical analysis of exoplanet habitability turns up one great candidate

The search for life beyond our planet continues, and one of the most underappreciated tools in an astrobiologist’s toolkit is statistics. While it might not be as glamorous as directly imaging a planet’s atmosphere or finding a system with seven planets in it, statistics is absolutely critical if we want to be sure that what we’re seeing is real and not just an artifact of the data, or of our observational techniques themselves.