NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) reports that the Kepler Space Telescope has already reached an important milestone by discovering its 1,000th exoplanet - is a planet that doesn't orbit the Sun.

The space telescope has been monitoring galaxies beyond the solar system, and to date it has observed more than 150,000 stars. Scientists have also discovered within those star systems more than 4,000 candidate planets that might hold possible life where the 1,000th is apparently similar to Earth.

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Scientists used Kepler data in order to validate eight new planets and added a whopping 554 candidates as potential planets where six of the exoplanets are Earth like in size and are also in the habitable zone of stars like the Earth as to the sun.

Three of these newly validated planets are located in the habitable zone near their sun where this particular range and distance from their star suggests that it could hold water on the surface of the planet. Out of the three planets, two of them are rocky in composition like Earth.

These planets called Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b apparently orbit around stars which are smaller and cooler than the sun in our solar system, which makes their habitable zone closer to their host star, located in the constellation Lyra.

From May 2009 to April 2013, the Kepler Space Telescope has detected a total of 554 planet candidates to a massive 4,174. Eight of these new planets are similar to Earth meaning they are also in the habitable zone near the sun. Six of them have stars that are almost the same size and temperature as the Sun.

NASA and Kepler will conduct further observations and more in-depth analysis in order to verify if they are actually planets. The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. 

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