On Tuesday, NASA announced the Kepler space telescope's discovery of 1,284 planets outside of our solar system, more than doubling the number of known Kepler exoplanets. This brings the tally up to 2,325.
More than 100 of the new planets are 1.2 Earth masses or smaller and are "almost certainly rocky in nature."
Of all the new planets, 550 are small and possibly rocky, and nine of them reside in the habitable zone, which could potentially support life.
"We are sampling the galaxy to understand how many planets there are and how far out we have to search in order to find potentially habitable planets like Earth," Natalie Batalha, the Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in the announcement.
The Kepler space telescope is a space observatory launched in 2009 with the mission of finding Earth-size planets in areas that could potentially support life.
The telescope searches for the faint dimming that occurs when a planet crosses the path of one of those stars. The goal of this is to identify possible exoplanets that are Earth-size or larger and are in zones favorable to life.
The new findings more than double the number of previously known exoplanets.
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