Known Alien Planets Nearly Doubles as NASA Discovers 715 New planets

[Ancient lion]

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 discovers 715 new planets - CNN.com
Population of Known Alien Planets Nearly Doubles as NASA Discovers 715 New Worlds | Space.com
http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-mission-announces-a-planet-bonanza/#.UxHzd_I5tkg

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Hearing about this the other day my first thought was it must be the 2000 or so 'candidate' planets and they confirmed a batch of them, but looking at JPL just now it's 700+ new planets 'confirmed' not 'candidates' so that's pretty cool.

PlanetQuest - The Search for Another Earth

1,690 confirmed exoplanets

3,845 candidates (sites explains candidates are highly probable to be actual planets.)

Nice though this kind of stuff is to hear about, ultimately it's depressing. These planets and their stars are light-years away. We have nothing that could ever get us there, even beaming radio transmissions there and hoping for one back would take generations. So it's purely academic at this point.