Feeling a bit lonely on our blue marble? Never fear! 715 new neighbors just moved in!

Actually, they were there all along. We just started noticing. 

On Wednesday, NASA announced that their Kepler  telescope satellite had newly verified the existence of 715  planets orbiting 305 stars outside our solar system. This brings the total number of confirmed planets to almost 1700. In the words of NASA scientist Jack Lissauer,

“We’ve almost doubled today the number of planets known to humanity.”

Why so many new discoveries? The Kepler telescope uses something called the transit method to find  planets: the telescope detects regular dimming in the light of a star caused by an orbiting planet passing in front of it. 

However, this method can result in false positives, so additional confirmation is needed to verify the existence of planets found this way. The recent glut of discoveries comes from a new statistical technique used to convert planet candidates to confirmed discoveries.

So what does this say about the possibility of extraterrestrial life? (After all, there’s only so much chatting you can do with a planet.)  

The probability of finding aliens is notoriously difficult to even estimate, but the odds may be improving. Four of the newly-discovered planets are less than 2.5 times the mass of Earth and orbit in the so called “Goldilocks zone.”

Like Goldilocks in the fairy tale, humans are picky about their temperatures, and planets in the “Goldilocks zone” orbit their suns at a distance that is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water. 

Stay tuned, Earthlings.