Our galactic neighborhood just got a lot bigger. NASA on Wednesday announced the discovery of 715 new planets, by far the biggest batch of planets ever unveiled at once.
By way of comparison, about 1,000 planets total had been identified in our galaxy before Wednesday.
Four of those planets are in what NASA calls the “habitable zone,” meaning they have the makeup to potentially support life.
The planets, which orbit 305 different stars, were discovered by the Kepler space telescope and were verified using a new technique that scientists expect to make new planetary discoveries more frequent and more detailed.
NASA says 95% of the planets discovered by Kepler are smaller than Neptune, which is four times as big as Earth.
One of them is about twice the size of Earth and orbits a star half the size of Earth’s sun in a 30-day cycle.