NASA's Kepler Telescope's duty is to search for new worlds. For years, it was able to detect exoplanets that are now a target of research to find habitable ones. Recently, the agency announced that they discovered hundreds of new planets by using the telescope. The surprising thing is that 10 of those new hundred planets could be near-Earth-size. These findings have a big implication in the Search For Life outside Earth.

The mission catalog of planetary candidates was released by NASA in a press release. There is a total of 219 new planet candidates.

The 10 near-Earth-size planets orbit their star or sun and are located in the "habitable zone." The location in the habitable zone makes them potentially habitable, too. This means, if the conditions are correct, life may thrive in those 10 planets. Orbiting a star near the habitable zone also means that the planet receives just the right amount of sunlight enabling water to exist.

“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate said in a press release by NASA.

Experts believe that in order to fully understand the placements of planets in the universe, they need to understand how often these types appear in different locations.

Catalog of near Earth-size planets

The catalog is considered to be the most comprehensive list of planet candidate. The candidates are actually planets that were found outside of the Solar System. Kepler's collective data consists of collated findings from four years of study comprises the catalog.

The catalog enumerates and simplifies the list of planetary candidates.

But in-depth information about the exoplanets discovered by Kepler telescope is available to the public on NASA's Exoplanet Archive. In total, there are 4,034 planet candidates successfully observed by NASA's Kepler Telescope.

Kepler telescope findings

During the past years, 2,335 out of the 4,034 planets were verified as exoplanets. Based on previous Kepler data, there were 50 near-Earth-size planets located in the habitable zone and 30 of them were already verified.

The discovery of these planets plays a huge role in the search for life outside the planet. The data suggests there are two distinct size group of small planets. The detailed presentation of the findings was presented last Monday, June 19 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.