A “bonanza” of new planets has been found at the heart of our galaxy, NASA astronomers according to the NASA astronomers.

In the region known as the Galactic Bulge, sixteen potential planets have been detected. The mass of stars and hot gas at the center of the Milky Way some 26,000 light-years away. Of the 16 newly detected bodies, 7 have been deemed likely planets, with the remaining 9 awaiting confirmation.

A team of astronomers discovered the planets during a seven-day survey of the constellation Sagittarius using the Hubble Space Telescope in February 2004.

The faraway find has dramatic implications for the ongoing search for other, possibly habitable planets, scientists said. Most notably, the survey reveals that planets are as plentiful around distant stars as they are around stars closer to our solar system.

“We had [already] found all of these planets relatively near the sun. We wanted to know, Are they there all across the galaxy?” said Mario Livio, an astronomer with the Hubble project, at a press conference today at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“The answer was yes, they are there, even at the center of the galaxy. … This allows us to say now with a very high degree of confidence that there are literally billions of planets in our galaxy.”

One of the planets completes its orbit in only ten hours, meaning that one solar year passes on the far-flung world in about the same time you spend between breakfast and dinner. The planets, which are gas giants about the size of Jupiter, also orbit closer to their stars than any other known worlds.
They are only able to survive such close proximities because the stars they orbit are relatively light and dim, the scientists explained.

“These planets [are] extremely close to their stars—so close that they get heated by the stars’ radiation to almost 3000 degrees Fahrenheit [1650 degrees Celsius],” said Kailash Sahu, principal investigator of the project. If denser, brighter stars like our sun had similar planets orbiting so closely, “they would simply evaporate,” he added.

The astronomers were able to spot the planets using a pair of crucial clues. One is a telltale “wobble” that a star often adopts in its path through space when a planet is orbiting it. The other is a slight dimming that occurs when a planet passes in front of a star.