European astronomers announced on Monday that they had found 32 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and said they believed their find meant that 40 percent or more of Sun-like stars had such planets.
The planets range in size from about five times the size of Earth to about five times the size of Jupiter.
More had been discovered, too, they said, promising more announcements later this year.
Stephane Udry, of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, said the latest discoveries brought the total of known exoplanets to about 400.
"Nature doesn't like a vacuum so if there is space to put a planet it will put a planet there," Udry said in an internet briefing from a meeting of astronomers in Porto, Portugal.
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"More than 40 percent of stars like the sun have low-mass planets," he added.
The team used the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or Harps, a spectrograph attached to the European Southern Observatory's 3.6m telescope in La Silla, Chile.
The spectrograph does not image the planets directly but scientists can calculate their size and mass by detecting tiny changes in a star's wobbling caused by a planet's small gravitational pull.
Astronomers are keen to find Earth-like planets because these are the most likely to harbour life. Harps has spotted 75 planets circling 30 different stars.
The ESO team did not give details of which stars the 32 new planets were circling. - Reuters
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