Hundreds of Possible Alien Planets exposed By NASA Spacecraft

NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for possible alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.If all 706 of these objects pass the severe follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the present number of known extrasolar planets. They were announce as part of a massive release of data from the mission's first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week.

The Kepler space observatory monitors stars for subtle change in their brightness, which could point to the attendance of alien planets passing in front of them as seen from Earth. Astronomers will use the newly-released data from Kepler to determine if orbit planets are answerable for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.

"This is the most precise, nearly continuous, greatest and largest data set of stellar photometry ever," said David Koch, the mission's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in a statement. "The results will only get improved as the duration of the data set grows with time."By measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars when planets cross – or transit – in front of them, astronomers can determine the size of the planet.

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