Is there life beyond planet Earth? The existential crisis lives on as NASA announced on Monday that it had discovered 219 potential planets, ten of which have a makeup similar to that of Earth.
NASA's Kepler space telescope is its first mission capable of identifying Earth-size planets around other stars, as the NASA blog explains.
Scientists gathered at the Ames Research Centre on Monday to discuss what Kepler has uncovered. Its recent findings, lying outside our Solar System, are located near the Cygnus constellation in the Milky Way galaxy.
Between 2009 and 2013, Kepler searched more than 200,000 stars in that region for orbiting planets, and since its work began has officially identified 2,300 planets.
'Out of the 219 new planet candidates, 10 are possibly rocky, terrestrial worlds and orbit their star in the habitable zone – the range of distances from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet,' NASA said.
'Water is a key ingredient to life as we know it. Many of the new planet candidates are likely to have small rocky cores enveloped by a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, and some are thought to be ocean worlds. That doesn't necessarily mean the oceans of these planets are full of water, but we can dream, can't we?'
The new potential planets means the total of potential habitable zone planets is now 50 across the galaxy, according to The Telegraph.
At NASA's press conference, Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist said: 'This survey catalog will be the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy's most compelling questions: How many planets like our Earth are actually in the galaxy?'
Mario Perez of Nasa's Astrophysics Division probed from the findings: 'Are we alone? Maybe Kepler today has told us indirectly, although we need confirmation, that we are probably not alone.'
