By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Kepler
space telescope has uncovered another 461 potential new planets,
most of which are the size of Earth or a few times larger,
scientists said on Monday. The announcement brings Kepler's head
count to 2,740 candidate new worlds, 105 of which have been
confirmed. "Two years ago we had around 1,200 candidate planet
objects. A year later, we added a significant number of new
objects and saw the trend of huge numbers of very small planets
... twice the size of Earth and smaller," Kepler astronomer
Christopher Burke told a news conference webcast from the
American Astronomical Society conference in Long Beach,
California. With the addition of 461 new candidate planets,
collected over 22 months of Kepler telescope observations, the
proliferation of smaller planets continues. The new targets
include what appears to be a planet about 1.5 times bigger than
Earth circling its sun-like parent star in a 242-day orbit - a
distance where liquid water, believed t