NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope team recently broke new ground with the discovery of eight new Earth-like exoplanets residing in the famed “Goldilocks Zone,” which is the perfect temperature for potential life to emerge. This milestone also marks the thousandth planet verified by the organization, a remarkable feat.

Kepler originally launched in 2009, peering into the reaches of space for light fluctuations, used to gauge the profile of a suspected planet.

“Kepler collected data for four years – long enough that we can now tease out the Earth-size candidates in one Earth-year orbits,” explains NASA scientists Fergal Mullally in an official statement. “We’re closer than we’ve ever been to finding Earth twins around other sun-like stars. These are the planets we’re looking for.”

During the onset of the Kepler mission, the satellite primarily found “low-hanging fruit,” according to fellow team member Natalie Batalha.

“Now we’re getting down into the weeds, and things are getting a little harder. But that’s a challenge we knew we would have,” she adds.

Currently, the exoplanet candidate count stands at 4,175 objects, alongside a number of gas giants and super-Earths.

Batahlia is confident that NASA can still extract plenty of useful data from the project. She notes that “Kepler was designed to find these earth analogues, and we always knew that the most interesting results would come at the end,” according to a Utah People’s Post report. “So we’re just kind of ramping up towards the most interesting results. There’s still a lot of good science to come out of Kepler.”

As SpaceAlabama.com reports, anyone can visit this link to sift through data from the past Kepler mission, K1. All you need to do is look for spaces where the light curve is lower than surrounding ones.

Associate Administrator at NASA, John Grunsfeld, contests that “Each result from the planet-hunting Kepler mission’s treasure trove of data takes us another step closer to answering the question of whether we are alone in the Universe. The Kepler team and its scientific community continue to produce impressive results with the data from this venerable explorer.”

So what are you doing still reading this article? There’s much planet hunting to be done.