NASA's now-being-designed WFIRST space telescope will give humans the largest, deepest, clearest picture of the universe since the Hubble Space Telescope, and could discover as many as 1,400 new planets in just 2 square degrees of the night sky, according to new research. Short for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, WFIRST is a space telescope currently under development by NASA. It's been designed to research three key areas: exoplanets, dark matter/dark energy, and the formation of stars and planets. Small, Earth-like planets orbiting close to their host stars should become visible, though the planets WFIRST is likely to find will be further from their stars than most planets found to date, according to Penny. The Kepler Space Telescope that found more than 2,600 planets outside our solar system, but ran out of fuel in October 2018.

Source: Forbes February 26, 2019 12:22 UTC