Nasa's planet-hunting deep space observatory has found hundreds of new potential planets, sparking hopes of finding other worlds similar to Earth.
The objects were found in Nasa's Kepler Mission, a space observatory designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
Its massive telescope monitors the brightness of over 145,000 stars in a fixed field of view in three constellations in the Milky Way.
A 95-megapixel camera records and analyses the passage of planets around those stars by measuring the changes in light radiation.
The findings show 140 of the new discoveries could be similar in size to Earth.
"From the orbital size and the temperature of the star, the planet's characteristic temperature can be calculated," Nasa explains on the mission's website.
"From this the question of whether or not the planet is habitable (not necessarily inhabited) can be answered."
Scientists say the results contradict older theories that had suggested small and Earth-like planets would be less frequent.
An astronomer on the Kepler mission, Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, revealed the findings in a conference in Oxford earlier this month.
He said the next step would be to determine whether the suspected planets would indeed be habitable.
"The figures suggest our galaxy, the Milky Way, will contain 100 million habitable planets," he said.
"With our own little telescope just in the next two years we will able to identify at least 60 of them.
"There is a lot more work we need to do with this, but the statistical result is loud and clear, and it is that planets like our own Earth are out there."
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