NASA's Kepler probe discovers over 1,200 new planets

​Washington: NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets - the single largest finding of planets to date - giving fresh hopes to astronomers to discover another Earth reverberating with life.

Scientists from Princeton University and NASA confirmed that 1,284 objects observed outside Earth's solar system are indeed planets.

"This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler so far to more than 2,300," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at the NASA headquarters in Washington.

"This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth," he added.

The discovery hinges on a technique developed at Princeton that allows scientists to efficiently analyse thousands of signals Kepler has identified to determine which are most likely to be caused by planets and which are caused by non-planetary objects such as stars.

This automated technique -- implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa -- computes the chances that the signal is in fact caused by a planet.