New discoveries from NASA’s Kepler space mission made public Wednesday reveal a large and surprising menagerie of planets deep in space, with some almost as small as Earth and others in the “habitable zones” of their solar systems where scientists think life could potentially exist.
With about 1,200 candidate planets now catalogued, Kepler has also identified a solar system with at least six small planets orbiting their sun – all lined up on a disc-like plane similar to our own.
The planets – called exoplanets because they are outside the Earth’s solar system – are believed to be gaseous rather than rocky and so unable to support life, but the discovery of a system with so many planets and all orbiting in a manner similar to planets in our system has created great excitement.
“This is a remarkable system and a very exciting sign of what else is to come,” said Jonathan Fortney, a member of the Kepler science team from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Full Story: Solar system with six exoplanets, others in habitable zones found by NASA’s Kepler