NASA KEPLER ANNOUNCEMENT UPDATE: More Than 1,200 New Planets that Could Hold Life Found

THE chance of alien life being found one day has been boosted after NASA scientists revealed they have found 1,284 NEW planets that could house alien life.

The US space agency has just announced the discovery of the new “exoplanets” which are considered as similar to Earth.

It more than doubles the previous amount of exoplanets found by the Kepler Telescope.

It comes after NASA said they now also believe every star in space has at least one planet orbiting it.

Among the new discoveries are also a further 100 grade A rocky exoplanets which are the most likely for life to begin just like Earth.

It was previously believed that many stars were out there alone, meaning the odds of other Earth-like planets with the right conditions for life to start are much higher than ever believed.

The information has come from astronomers researching swathes of data from the Kepler Telescope mission.

NASA madr the major announcement about the latest findings from the Kepler research at an ongoing press conference, so click back on this story which wll be updated.

A NASA spokesman said: “When Kepler was launched in March 2009, scientists did not know how common planets were outside our solar system.

“Thanks to Kepler’s treasure trove of discoveries, astronomers now believe there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky.”

Kepler completed its prime mission in 2012, and collected data for an additional year in an extended mission.

In 2014, the spacecraft began a new extended mission called K2.

K2 continues the search for exoplanets while introducing new research opportunities to study young stars, supernovae and other cosmic phenomena.

NASA CGI of how it imagines the surface of Kepler 452b may look

NASA said yesterday a big announcement about its search for alien life was due today, leaving high hopes it had discovered evidence of possible habitation, and leaving conspiracy theorists convinced it was about to confirm extra terrestrials HAVE been visiting the plane

The US space agency yesterday posted on its website it will today unveil to the globe the “latest discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope”, during a news teleconference at 5pm.

Express.co.uk reported last week how NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan recently said “strong indications of life beyond Earth” would likely be obtained within the next decade.

So there was anticipation over what was due from the Kepler Mission, which uses the powerful Kepler Telescope to look at changes in the light of distant stars to establish the planets orbiting them and distance from them.

It has identified more than 1,000 so far.

One of the more notable came last July with the discovery of what NASA described as “Earth’s bigger older cousin”, called Kepler-452b, and later dubbed Earth 2.

Kepler project scientists used the telescope to track down the Earth-like planet, but estimated 452-b is 60 per cent bigger and probably weighs five times as much as our own planet.

The five times bigger mass would make Kepler 452-b’s gravitational pull at least twice as strong as on Earth – something humans would find very difficult to deal with, as possible space explorers would feel twice as heavy.

According to NASA scientists who unveiled the discovery of the planet last year, if humans ever reached Kepler 452-b we would eventually evolve into much stockier beings because of its gravitational force.

The best guesses are that Kepler 452-b would have a rocky surface like Earth, with active volcanoes and an atmosphere that could hold gases and keep water and oceans on its surface.

Experts also believe that temperatures would be 20 per cent hotter on Kepler 452-b than Earth, because its star – at six billion years old as opposed to our Sun’s 4.5 billion years – would be 10 per cent bigger and 20 per cent brighter than the Sun.

It means the surface of Kepler 452-b could be uninhabitable for billions of years, although the team admitted they could be out by 2billion years either way on the age of the exoplanet’s star.

Based on their estimates, the team were able to draw a Computer Generated Image (CGI) of how Kepler 452-b might look if a major greenhouse effect were underway.

It features small bodies of water left over from drying seas that are saturated in minerals and salt.

However, different gravity aside, Kepler-452b should look quite familiar as it orbits a star at about the same distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun.

Jon Jenkins, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California said: “It would feel a lot like home, from the standpoint of the sunshine that you would experience.

But although it inhabited the so-called Goldilocks zone at the right temperature of not too hot or cold from its distant star, and had a rocky surface, there was no actual evidence it did house life.Other speculation surrounds the theory of an “alien megastructure” around a distant star also sparked by the mission last year.

Also last year, scientists triggered a major alien mystery which remains unresolved after spotting something bizarre through the Kepler Telescope.

An unknown object which was causing the light produced by the star KIC 8462852 to dim by more than 20% was speculated by researchers as being anything from comets to a huge Star Wars Death Star-like alien-built “megastructure” around it that could even be harvesting solar energy.

This was later dismissed as probably the more wilder type of speculation after boffins from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life Institute (SETI) got involved.

SETI project experts watched the star with a powerful radio telescope with 42 six-metre antennas, finding no signs of life.

Massimo Marengo of Iowa State University said: “The scenario in which the dimming in the KIC 8462852 light curve were caused by the destruction of a family of comets remains the preferred explanation.” – Express.co.uk