NASA announces discovery of over 1200 planets

Astros are located outside the Solar System and were discovered using the Kepler space telescope. Among the new planets nine may have conditions which allow the existence of life.

                      
                       Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 2,300 planets

NASA announced on Tuesday (10/05) the discovery of 1,284 planets outside the solar system. The exoplanets were found by the Kepler space telescope. The announcement was the largest ever in the area and doubles the number of planets confirmed by the device.

"We now know that there may be more planets than stars," said the director of the Astrophysics Division of NASA's Paul Hertz.

Nine of the planets orbiting the sun its area zone, ie, a distance of a star in which the planets may have temperatures that allow the presence of liquid water and therefore life. With this discovery, up to 21 the total number of planets conehcidos this condition. The telescope also discovered 550 planets that could be rocky like Earth.

The Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009 and collected 2013 data from 150,000 stars in search of potentially habitable planets signals. The device detects light variations that indicate the passage of planets per star, during its orbit - the phenomenon is the same that happened to Mercury on Monday.

With the announcement Tuesday, the number of known exoplanets rose to 3,264. The survey results also suggest that there may be more than 10 billion of potentially habitable planets in the universe.