WASHINGTON: The Earth’s galaxy is looking far more crowded. NASA has confirmed 715 newly discovered planets outside the solar system.

Douglas Hudgins of NASA termed Wednesday’s announcement a major step towards the planet-hunting Kepler telescope’s ultimate goal: ‘finding Earth 2’.

It’s also a big step in “the possibility of life elsewhere”, said Lisa Kaltenegger, a Harvard and Max Planck Institute astronomer who wasn’t part of the discovery team.

Scientists using the Kepler telescope pushed the number of planets discovered in the galaxy to about 1,700. Twenty years ago, astronomers had not found any planets circling stars other than the ones revolving around the sun.

Astronomers used a new confirmation technique to come up with the largest single announcement of a batch of exoplanets — what planets outside our solar system are called.

The announcements also were about implications for life behind those big numbers. All the new planets are in systems like ours where multiple planets circle a star.

The 715 planets were nearly all in size closer to Earth than gigantic Jupiter. And four of those new exoplanets orbit their stars in “habitable zones” where it is not too hot or too cold for liquid water which is crucial for life to exist.

The four new habitable zone planets are all twice as big as Earth so that makes them more likely to be gas planets instead of rocky ones. So far Kepler has found nine exoplanets in the habitable zone, NASA said.—AP