There are over a thousand new objects in the universe today, at least in the universe we on Earth have seen.

The fresh discoveries were made by the Kepler space telescope, an orbiting observatory trained towards the far reaches of space in search of Earth-like worlds.

An official announcement by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration explained Kepler observed 715 new planets orbiting 305 stars, many of which are in multiple-planet systems like our own solar system.

NASA scientists say upwards of 95 percent of the identified planets are smaller than Neptune, which is about four times bigger than Earth.

The discovery notably boosts the number of known, small-sized exoplanets -- which reside in other solar systems -- similar to the earth.

"The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's 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."

Sighting and then verifying the existence of planets outside Earth;s immediate solar family has been slow and laborious since the first such worlds were discovered about two decades ago, say NASA officials.

However, recent advances in technology have given researchers a statistical approach that can be applied to many planets at once, when they are spotted in systems in which more than one planet around flies around the same star.

"Four years ago, Kepler began a string of announcements of first hundreds, then thousands, of planet candidates -- but they were only candidate worlds," said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "We've now developed a process to verify multiple planet candidates in bulk to deliver planets wholesale, and have used it to unveil a veritable bonanza of new worlds."

To verify the bounty of planets, a research team co-led by Lissauer analyzed stars with more than one potential planet, all of which were detected from May 2009 to March 2011, during the first two years of the Kepler mission.

The researchers used a technique called verification by multiplicity, which relies in part on the logic of probability.

For instance, Kepler observes 150,000 stars and finds a few thousand of those to have planet candidates. If the planet candidates were randomly distributed among the observed stars, only a handful of those stars would be deemed likely of having more than one candidate.

But, Kepler observed hundreds of stars with multiple planet candidates. Applying those new insights to certain probability formulas and then careful study, the science team was able to verify the trove of new planets.

These multiple-planet systems are prime regions for studying individual planets and the configuration of planetary neighborhoods, providing key data about the process of planet formation.

Four of these new planets are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their own sun's habitable zone, which scientists define as the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet may be suitable for life-giving liquid water.

"From this study we learn planets in these multi-systems are small and their orbits are flat and circular -- resembling pancakes -- not your classical view of an atom," said Jason Rowe, research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and co-leader of the research. "The more we explore the more we find familiar traces of ourselves amongst the stars that remind us of home."

This latest discovery brings the confirmed count of planets outside our solar system to nearly 1,700.