Astronomers have spied 104 new worlds in the Milky Way using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.

Part of Kepler broke down in 2013, but engineers managed to repair it and send it on a fresh mission, dubbed K2. This latest discovery, from Ian Crossfield at the University of Arizona in Tucson and an international team, is the biggest so far for the K2 mission. The team reports numerous planetary candidates, and confirmed more than 100 as exoplanets using additional observations from ground-based telescopes. They found that the majority of planets are smaller than Neptune, and probably have thick atmospheres and rocky cores. Nearly 40 have a radius that is about twice that of Earth or smaller, and 4 of those orbit the same red dwarf star.

Two of the planets orbiting the red dwarf could have irradiation levels that are similar to Earth's, making life on those planets a possibility, according to the authors.

Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. (in the press); preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05263 (2016)