The exoplanet hunting Kepler space observatory run by NASA has verified the discovery of 1,284 new exoplanets. It's the single largest finding of exoplanets to date.

NASA said an analysis of Kepler's July 2015 planet candidate catalog identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the planet candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent, which is the minimum required to earn the status of "planet."

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In addition, 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets but don't meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.

Close to 550 of these newly-validated planets could be rocky planets like Earth based on their size. Nine of these exoplanets orbit in their sun's habitable or Goldilocks zone. This life-sustaining zone is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool.

With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group.

Of the nearly 5,000 total planet candidates found to date by astronomers all over the world, over 3,200 have been verified and 2,325 of these were discovered by Kepler.

This announcement of the discovery of 1,284 exoplanets is based on a statistical analysis method that can be applied to many planet candidates simultaneously, said NASA.

Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey and lead author of the scientific paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, employed a technique to assign each Kepler candidate a planet-hood probability percentage. This is the first such automated computation on this scale since previous statistical techniques focused only on sub-groups within the greater list of planet candidates identified by Kepler.

Kepler was launched by NASA on March 7, 2009 to discover Earth-size exoplanets in or near habitable zones orbiting other stars in the Milky Way.

Placed in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, Kepler is designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way and discover exoplanets using a transit hunting method. The science instrument that hunts for exoplanets is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view

 "This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth."

"Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars," said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters.

"This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe."

In 2018, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will monitor 200,000 bright nearby stars and search for exoplanets, focusing on Earth and Super-Earth-sized.

TagsKepler space observatory, NASA, Exoplanets, habitable zone, photometer, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite