NASA research scientist Jessie Christiansen has scoured the galaxy to discover thousands of planets, but her favourite find was made with the help of the Australian public.
The multi-planet system known as K2-138 was discovered after 10,000 volunteers from Australia poured over data from the K2 satellite.
"Humans are very good at pattern matching, they can often see the dips in a light curve better than a computer," Dr Christiansen told AAP.
The Australian astrophysicist has been on tour during National Science Week discussing her findings with school students from Ballarat in Victoria.
Using web platform Zooniverse, Dr Christiansen and her NASA colleagues created a new project Exoplanet Explorer, which featured on the ABC's Stargazing TV program in April last year.
Viewers were able to log on to Zooniverse and picked out what they thought might be new planets based on light curves.
What they discovered was K2-138, the first exoplanet system of its kind to be discovered by citizen scientists.
Dr Christiansen, who originally hails from Ipswich in Queensland, has also been sharing her insights into her recent project that involved using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.
The telescope was launched in 2009 to find exoplanets outside our solar system, but last week NASA announced it had run out of fuel and would not continue to operate.
The striking discoveries of Kepler, including the existence of rocky planets like Earth throughout the galaxy, are increasing our chances of discovering life and habitable worlds.
"If you start with the assumption that the life we are looking for is similar to that on Earth, which is already a fairly large assumption of what life should look like, the fact that rocky planets are common throughout the galaxy is good news," Dr Christiansen said.
"It means there are lots of places for life to arrive."
Another surprising Kepler discovery was that of mid-sized planets, between the size of Earth and Neptune.
"This is a mystery to us, we don't know whether they're little rocks that are scaled up to be bigger, or ice giants like Neptune that are scaled down."
NASA's new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the next step in the search for extra-solar planets.
Dr Christiansen is confident TESS will shed some light on the planets atmosphere as well measuring their mass, size and density.
Over two years the satellite will survey the entire sky, using the transit method of detecting exoplanets which looks for a dip in the brightness of stars.
"Right now, my team is back in America and we're looking over the data and super excited to get our first result."
"We expect to find our first planets this week."
Australian Associated Press
