Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar SystemResearch (MPS), the Georg August University of Göttingen and the Sonneberg Observatoryhave discovered 18 planets beyond the solar system.  

An exoplanet is a planet that is found outside the Solar Systemand orbiting a star.

More than 4,000 of them have been discovered so far, largely byNasa's Kepler space telescope, but 96% of these were bigger than Earth.

The whole point of the Kepler space telescope mission was toidentify Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars.

The scientists re-analyzed a part of the data from NASA's KeplerSpace Telescope with a new and sensitive method developed by them. Theyestimate that this new method has the potential of finding 100 additionalexoplanets from the entire Kepler mission's datasheet.  

These worlds are so small that previous surveys have overlookedthem. However, one among them has the potential to offer condition friendly tolife.