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NASA’s Kepler Mission continues to produce astonishing new data from its planet hunting space telescope. The new data reveals the discovery of 54 candidates which exist around the “habitable zone” of a star, a region which allows liquid water to be present on the planet’s surface. Five of these planets are thought to be around the same size as Earth.

These candidates need further observations to confirm that they are indeed planets, but NASA scientist William Borucki said “most of them, I’m convinced, will be confirmed as planets in the coming months and years”.

Also announced was the discovery of a new planetary system around a star 2,000 lights years from Earth. The star Kepler-11 is now known to have six planets orbiting around it. It is the most “populated” solar system yet to be discovered outside our own. All of the planets around Kepler-11 are larger than Earth, and all but one of them orbit closer to their star than any planet in our solar system.

Planetary scientist and Kepler team member Jack Lissaeur said “The Kepler-11 planetary system is amazing, it’s amazingly compact, it’s amazingly flat, there’s an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting close to their star - we didn’t know such systems could even exist”.

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