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LequteMan
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America- The U.S. Space Agency, NASA, on Thursday, said that its Kepler spacecraft had verified the existence of 715 more planets orbiting stars outside the solar system.
The latest discovery brings the confirmed count of planets beyond the solar system to nearly 1,700, Jack Lissauer, a Planetary Scientist at NASA's Ames Research Centre told a press teleconference in Washington.
According to him, the newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, meaning; many are in multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.
Nearly 95 per cent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth, he added.
He said four of the new planets are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone, where water can exist in liquid form.
NASA said the verification of the existence of a planet ``is a laborious planet-by-planet process" in the past, but the team has a new powerful statistical technique that can be applied to many planets at once.
The team used the technique called verification by multiplicity to analyse stars with more than one potential planet, all of which were detected in the first two years of Kepler's observations, May 2009 to March 2011, and identified the 715 new planets.
Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. Discoveries include more than 3,600 planet candidates, of which 961 have been verified as bona-fide worlds.
The findings will be published on March 10 in The Astrophysical Journal.
The latest discovery brings the confirmed count of planets beyond the solar system to nearly 1,700, Jack Lissauer, a Planetary Scientist at NASA's Ames Research Centre told a press teleconference in Washington.
According to him, the newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, meaning; many are in multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.
Nearly 95 per cent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth, he added.
He said four of the new planets are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone, where water can exist in liquid form.
NASA said the verification of the existence of a planet ``is a laborious planet-by-planet process" in the past, but the team has a new powerful statistical technique that can be applied to many planets at once.
The team used the technique called verification by multiplicity to analyse stars with more than one potential planet, all of which were detected in the first two years of Kepler's observations, May 2009 to March 2011, and identified the 715 new planets.
Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. Discoveries include more than 3,600 planet candidates, of which 961 have been verified as bona-fide worlds.
The findings will be published on March 10 in The Astrophysical Journal.