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Actually, Google has helped to discover planets, among other things

See, e.g., http://research.google.com/pubs/author37653.html

That was an accident that turned out to be pretty damned amazing

"chance favors the prepared mind"

But if they wanted to, its more than within their ability. I'm sure they have plenty of idle computing time to do so with the proper physical sensors providing data.

Computer power (or lack thereof) is definitely not the limiting reagent in science today.

I think this is only true if you don't consider trillion-fold cost reduction as an option.

A few years back I worked on data taking for the CMS detector at the LHC. We were Tier1 in the US; we took the data from Tier0 at the physical detector and distributed it to 800+ orgs around the work. We had 6000+ linux machines and a staff of 10.

To say computing power isn't the limiting factor is disingenuous. Yes, you can go spin up thousands of instances in Amazon and store PB of data. Show me your budget to do so though.