Kepler's Count Still Rising

This week, NASA announced new results of the ongoing work of Kepler, its planet hunting spacecraft.  The announcement declared Kepler had found 461 more possible exoplanets.  Further, four of them are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit within their stars' habitable zones, making them strong possibilities as abodes of life.

All these possible worlds still have to be confirmed, but astronomers are confident that 90 percent will turn out to be real.  That would push the number of exoplaanets discovered to well over 1,000.