Nearly 100 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system have been found by Nasa's Kepler telescope.

Researchers confirmed the presence of the 95 worlds after studying 275 possible candidates from data provided by the probe.

Kepler, which is currently on the K2 mission to discover exoplanets, has found thousands of candidates since it was launched almost a decade ago.

The latest discovery raises hopes that astronomers may soon find a system similar to our own that hosts alien life.

Scroll down for video

Danish researchers have located 95 new planets using the Kepler telescope that was launched nearly a decade ago. The telescope has discovered thousands of planets in distant systems

The study was done by an international team led by Andrew Mayo from the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark.

'By increasing the number of planets discovered with K2 by almost 50 percent, this work will help astronomers dive much deeper into analysing and learning about individual planets, particularly smaller exoplanets,' Dr Mayo told Gizmodo.

The Kepler spacecraft was launched in 2009 to hunt for exoplanets in a single patch of sky, but in 2013 a mechanical failure crippled the telescope.

However, astronomers and engineers devised a way to repurpose and save the space telescope by changing its field of view periodically. This solution paved the way for the follow up K2 mission, which is still ongoing as the spacecraft searches for exoplanet transits.

These transits can be found by registering dips in light caused by the shadow of an exoplanet as it crosses in front of its host star.

These dips are indications of exoplanets which must then be examined much closer in order to validate the candidates that are actually exoplanets.

The field of exoplanets is relatively young.

The first planet orbiting a star similar to our own sun was detected only in 1995.

WHAT IS THE KEPLER TELESCOPE? The Kepler mission has spotted thousands of exoplanets since 2014, with 30 planets less than twice the size of Earth now known to orbit within the habitable zones of their stars. Launched from Cape Canaveral on March 7th 2009, the Kepler telescope has helped in the search for planets outside of the solar system. It captured its last ever image on September 25 2018 and ran out of fuel five days later. When it was launched it weighed 2,320 lbs (1,052 kg) and is 15.4 feet long by 8.9 feet wide (4.7 m × 2.7 m). The satellite typically looks for 'Earth-like' planets, meaning they are rocky and orbit within the that orbit within the habitable or 'Goldilocks' zone of a star. In total, Kepler has found around 5,000 unconfirmed 'candidate' exoplanets, with a further 2,500 'confirmed' exoplanets that scientists have since shown to be real. Kepler is currently on the 'K2' mission to discover more exoplanets. K2 is the second mission for the spacecraft and was implemented by necessity over desire as two reaction wheels on the spacecraft failed. These wheels control direction and altitude of the spacecraft and help point it in the right direction. The modified mission looks at exoplanets around dim red dwarf stars. While the planet has found thousands of exoplanets during its eight-year mission, five in particular have stuck out. Kepler-452b, dubbed 'Earth 2.0', shares many characteristics with our planet despite sitting 1,400 light years away. It was found by Nasa's Kepler telescope in 2014 1) 'Earth 2.0' In 2014 the telescope made one of its biggest discoveries when it spotted exoplanet Kepler-452b, dubbed 'Earth 2.0'. The object shares many characteristics with our planet despite sitting 1,400 light years away. It has a similar size orbit to Earth, receives roughly the same amount of sun light and has same length of year. Experts still aren't sure whether the planet hosts life, but say if plants were transferred there, they would likely survive. 2) The first planet found to orbit two stars Kepler found a planet that orbits two stars, known as a binary star system, in 2011. The system, known as Kepler-16b, is roughly 200 light years from Earth. Experts compared the system to the famous 'double-sunset' pictured on Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in 'Star Wars: A New Hope'. 3) Finding the first habitable planet outside of the solar system Scientists found Kepler-22b in 2011, the first habitable planet found by astronomers outside of the solar system. The habitable super-Earth appears to be a large, rocky planet with a surface temperature of about 72°F (22°C), similar to a spring day on Earth. 4) Discovering a 'super-Earth' The telescope found its first 'super-Earth' in April 2017, a huge planet called LHS 1140b. It orbits a red dwarf star around 40 million light years away, and scientists think it holds giant oceans of magma. 5) Finding the 'Trappist-1' star system The Trappist-1 star system, which hosts a record seven Earth-like planets, was one of the biggest discoveries of 2017. Each of the planets, which orbit a dwarf star just 39 million light years, likely holds water at its surface. Three of the planets have such good conditions that scientists say life may have already evolved on them. Kepler spotted the system in 2016, but scientists revealed the discovery in a series of papers released in February this year. Kepler is a telescope that has an incredibly sensitive instrument known as a photometer that detects the slightest changes in light emitted from stars How does Kepler discover planets? The telescope has an incredibly sensitive instrument known as a photometer that detects the slightest changes in light emitted from stars. It tracks 100,000 stars simultaneously, looking for telltale drops in light intensity that indicate an orbiting planet passing between the satellite and its distant target. When a planet passes in front of a star as viewed from Earth, the event is called a 'transit'. Tiny dips in the brightness of a star during a transit can help scientists determine the orbit and size of the planet, as well as the size of the star. Based on these calculations, scientists can determine whether the planet sits in the star's 'habitable zone', and therefore whether it might host the conditions for alien life to grow. Kepler was the first spacecraft to survey the planets in our own galaxy, and over the years its observations confirmed the existence of more than 2,600 exoplanets - many of which could be key targets in the search for alien life Advertisement

Today some 3,600 exoplanets have been found, ranging from rocky Earth-sized planets to large gas giants like Jupiter.

It's difficult work to distinguish which signals are actually coming from exoplanets.

Dr Mayo and his colleagues analysed hundreds of signals of potential exoplanets thoroughly to determine which signals were created by exoplanets and which were caused by other sources.

'We found that some of the signals were caused by multiple star systems or noise from the spacecraft. But we also detected planets that range from sub Earth-sized to the size of Jupiter and larger,' said Dr Mayo.

NASA confirmed for the first time that distant star systems can be home to 'families as large as our own' and it found one planet that was orbiting a very bright star (stock)

One of the planets detected was orbiting a very bright star.

'We validated a planet on a 10 day orbit around a star called HD 212657, which is now the brightest star found by either the Kepler or K2 missions to host a validated planet.

'Planets around bright stars are important because astronomers can learn a lot about them from ground-based observatories,' said Dr Mayo.

'Exoplanets are a very exciting field of space science. As more planets are discovered, astronomers will develop a much better picture of the nature of exoplanets which in turn will allow us to place our own solar system into a galactic context'.

The latest study follows news in December that the Kepler probe had found an eighth planet in a distant star system called Kepler 90.

This was the first time a faraway star had been found to have the same number of planets orbiting it as our own sun.

According to NASA, it confirmed for the first time that distant star systems can be home to 'families as large as our own.'

The new planet, estimated to be about 30 percent larger than Earth, is 'not a place you'd like to visit,' said Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin.

'It is probably rocky, and doesn't have a thick atmosphere'. And, temperatures at the surface are 'scorching.'

According to Vanderburg, the average surface temperature is likely around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Kepler planet hunting satellite has been searching the stars for distant worlds using Google's AI system, which used machine learning to 'find' planets in the Kepler data with up to 96 percent accuracy.

Neural networks can be trained on huge amounts of data to determine the difference between objects with great accuracy, the team explained in the teleconference.

Much like an AI can learn to spot the difference between cats and dogs, it can spot the difference between patterns associated with planets, and other types of patterns in the cosmos that could be false positives.

The star system sits roughly 2,545 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco, and of the new planets found, Kepler 90i is the 'smallest of the bunch.'

The new planet orbits its star once every 14.4 days.

But, all of the planets in this system 'tightly' orbit their star, which is thought to be cooler than our own sun, meaning their orbital periods are relatively short.

Before the latest AI-guided results, 'Kepler 90 was tied with Trappist-1, with 7 planets each,' says Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.

'But now, it ties with our own system with the most known number of planets' around a star.