461 Planets Found by NASA’s Kepler Mission

461 new planets to be exact. The NASA Kepler mission on Monday announced the discovery of 461 new planet candidates. Four of the new planets may have liquid water on the surface as they orbit in their sun’s “habitable zone.”

“The large number of multi-candidate systems being found by Kepler implies that a substantial fraction of exoplanets reside in flat multi-planet systems,” said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “This is consistent with what we know about our own planetary neighborhood.”

The Kepler space telescope identifies planet candidates by repeatedly measuring the change in brightness of more than 150,000 stars in search of planets that pass in front of, or “transit,” their host star. At least three transits are required to verify a signal as a potential planet.