By Bill Chappell, Source: NPR

The job of NASA’s Kepler mission is to peek at the far reaches of space in the hopes of finding potentially habitable planets. The space agency announced a stunning success, saying that Kepler had identified 715 new planets that orbit 305 stars. The discovery boosts the number of verified planets by around 70 percent.

“Four of the planets are about twice the size of Earth and orbit in their star’s so-called habitable zone,” NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce reports for our Newscast unit, “where temperatures might be suitable for liquid water.”

Here are more of the findings :

– The new discoveries are in multiple-planet systems like our solar system, NASA says.
– 94 percent of the planets are smaller than Neptune (which is nearly 4 times Earth’s size).
– The planets and stars were analyzed by researchers using data from the first two years of Kepler’s observations — May 2009 to March 2011.
– The count of verified “exoplanets” (those outside our solar system) now stands at nearly 1,700.

“From this study we learn planets in these multisystems are small and their orbits are flat and circular — resembling pancakes — not your classical view of an atom,” says Jason Rowe, a leader of the research team and a scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “The more we explore the more we find familiar traces of ourselves amongst the stars that remind us of home.”

Read the full article at: NPR