NASA: NEW EIGHTH planet revealed during Kepler discovery

Kepler is a retired space telescope launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. It was designed to survey a specific portion of Earth's region in the Milky Way to discover similar planets and estimate how many of the billions of stars have such planets. Kepler's sole scientific instrument was a photometer that continually monitored the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view.