The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) planet-hunting telescope is finding a huge number of possibilities in the search for alien life, with an early report indicating that relatively small planets and stable multi-planet systems are far more plentiful that previous searches found. NASA released new data Wednesday from its Kepler telescope on more than 1,000 possible new planets outside our solar system, more than doubling the count of what astronomers call exoplanets. The astronomers have not yet confirmed all the exoplanets, but some estimate that 90 percent of what Kepler has found eventually will be verified. Kepler, launched in 2009, has been orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars, conducting a exoplanet census and searching for Earth-like exoplanets since last year. It has found there are more exoplanets that are much smaller than Jupiter-the biggest planet in our solar system-than there are giant exoplanets. Some of the exoplanets approach Earth's size, meaning they are better potential candidates for life than the giants that are more easily located, astronomers say. While Kepler has not yet found exoplanets that are as small as Earth, all the results are "pointing in the right direction," Kepler researcher Jonathan Fortney was quoted as saying by the Associated Press (AP). Yale University exoplanet expert Debra Fischer, who was not part of the Kepler team but serves as an outside advisor for NASA, said the new information "gives us a much firmer footing" in eventual hopes to find worlds that could harbor life. "I feel different today knowing these new Kepler results than I did a week ago," she was quoted as saying by AP.
