The Kepler space telescope has discovered 715 new planets outside our solar system, including four that could be habitable , according to the US space agency (NASA).
Kepler, the space mission launched in March 2009 and now has a replacement, was NASA's first mission to locate Earth-like planets that had the ideal conditions to support life. Since its launch, Kepler has not stopped surprising us with the "hunt" for new planets that we may have fantasized we could live with in the future.
Thanks to this new discovery, which is the largest planetary discovery ever made to date , we now have almost 1,700 confirmed planets that would be found outside our solar system.
Of these 715 new planets, 95% are smaller than Neptune. Considering that Neptune has a radius four times that of Earth, astronomers explain that after this discovery it can be said that the planets in our galaxy are rather small . And not only that, the new exoplanets orbit only 305 stars, which means that they are in multiplanetary systems, just like in our solar system.
As if this were not enough, four of these new exoplanets could harbor life , since they are located in an area where it is neither too cold nor too hot that favors the existence of water in a liquid state, an essential factor for life.
