NASA announced on Friday that its Kepler telescope has discovered 11 new planetary systems that include 26 confirmed alien planets.
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The new planets vary in size from one-and-a-half times the radius of Earth to bigger than Jupiter. Their orbital periods range from six to 143 days, and they all orbit closer to their stars than Venus does to our sun.
The discoveries nearly double the number of alien worlds -- or "exoplanets" planets -- found by Kepler outside our solar system and help astronomers better understand how planets form. However, scientists still have to determine the make-up of the planets, such as whether their surfaces are rocky or gaseous.
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"Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky," Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits."
The Kepler telescope is pointed at a location in the sky that contains 150,000 stars. It looks for potential planets by measuring the change in brightness that happens when a possible planet passes in front of a star. NASA said that each of the new confirmed planetary systems contains two to five closely spaced transiting planets.
"In tightly packed planetary systems, the gravitational pull of the planets among themselves causes one planet to accelerate and another planet to decelerate along its orbit," NASA said. "The acceleration causes the orbital period of each planet to change."
Kepler said it detects this effect by measuring the changes, known as Transit Timing Variations (TTVs).
The system with the most planets among these discoveries is Kepler-33, which NASA said is a star that is older and more massive than our sun. Kepler-33 hosts five planets, ranging in size from 1.5 to 5 times that of Earth and all located closer to their star than any planet is to the sun.
To see artist renderings of some of Kepler's latest findings, check out the gallery below.
NASA Kepler Telescope
Discovered by NASA's Kepler telescope, this rendering provides an overhead view of orbital positions of the planets in systems with multiple transiting planets. Image courtesy of NASA.
Click here to view this gallery.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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