NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, after just four months of work, shows that small planets like Earth are much more prevalent than Jupiter-sized worlds and that multiple-planet systems are common. “We think we’re seeing about 200 multi-planet systems,” astronomer Daniel Fabrycky, with the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Discovery News. “That really blew us away. We didn’t expect that this would be one of Kepler’s discoveries.” The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified so far by Kepler to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size.
Search
1,200 New Potential Planets Found
A NASA telescope counting planets in one neighborhood of the Milky Way registered more than 1,200 candidates, including 54 in life-friendly orbits around their parent stars.
Monthly Issue
April 2026
In this monthly issue, we examine how our understanding of energy — and how we source and use it — is evolving.
1 video
11 articles