By Desiree Salas (staff@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Feb 26, 2014 11:03 PM EST

NASA researchers just got lucky - they hit the science jackpot by discovering 715 new planets all at once. Plus, four of these worlds have conditions that can support human life.

Perhaps you think that this is nothing compared to the number of planets NASA scientists have already discovered. However, only a total of 1,000 planets have been identified by researchers so far, before Wednesday's announcement. Which means this recent find is a groundbreaking one indeed - thus the elation of the people at NASA.

"We've been able to open the bottleneck to access the mother lode and deliver to you more than 20 times as many planets as has ever been found and announced at once," explained planetary scientist Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center in California, CNN noted.

The discovery was attributed to the use of the Kepler space telescope, which was launched in March 2009. The Kepler space observatory was the first mission that aimed to find planets with similar Earth profiles or at least close to being habitable by humans.

"The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results," declared NASA's John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds."

NASA explained that the process of verifying planet discoveries is "laborious." However, scientists were able to use a "statistical technique that can be applied to many planets at once when they are found in systems that harbor more than one planet around the same star."

"The research team used a technique called verification by multiplicity, which relies in part on the logic of probability. Kepler observes 150,000 stars, and has found a few thousand of those to have planet candidates. If the candidates were randomly distributed among Kepler's stars, only a handful would have more than one planet candidate. However, Kepler observed hundreds of stars that have multiple planet candidates. Through a careful study of this sample, these 715 new planets were verified," NASA clarified further.

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