NASA has identified 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of sky.
Hundreds of Possible Alien Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft
Currently NASA is conducting a sort of alien world means test and if following tests of the 706 candidates pass that could mean that the current number of known extrasolar planets could triple. "This is the most precise, nearly continuous, longest 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 better as the duration of the data set grows with time."
This information was announced recently as part of a huge release of data from the missions first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week.