The habitable universe got a bit bigger on Tuesday after NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope mission announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets outside of our solar system, dubbed “exoplanets.”
The discovery is the largest number of new planets released at one time, more than doubling the number of known planets found by Kepler.
NASA says nine of the planets could have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool — meaning they could be potentially habitable.
“This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe,” Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters, said Tuesday.
The analysis released Tuesday was of roughly 4,300 potential planets from the Kepler’s July 2015 planet candidate catalogue.
An additional 1,327 planet candidates from that group still require further study to determine whether they are planets. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena, NASA said.
Of the nearly 5,000 total planet candidates found to date, more than 3,200 have now been verified as planets. Kepler found 2,325 of those.
“This work will help Kepler reach its full potential by yielding a deeper understanding of the number of stars that harbor potentially habitable, Earth-size planets — a number that’s needed to design future missions to search for habitable environments and living worlds,” said Natalie Batalha, the Kepler mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
Kepler was launched in 2009 to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars.
Astronomers in 2012 announced that on average, every star has at least one planet.
