In an announcement made at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D. C., William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said that the recently-launched Kepler space telescope has discovered five new planets orbiting distant stars.

While four out of these newly-detected five planets - dubbed Kepler 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b - are 1.3 to 1.5 times wider than Jupiter in our solar system; one of them, dubbed Kepler-4b, is approximately as big as Neptune and is almost 8 percent Jupiter's weight. NASA temperature estimates revealed that all of the planets are hotter than molten lava and could 'turn gold to goo.'

Borucki, the science team leader of the last-year-launched, $591 million Kepler space telescope mission, further elucidated: "These planets orbit quite close to their stars, so they're quite hot."

Noting that due to their closeness to the stars that they orbit, the planets complete their orbit in every four days and bake at temperatures higher than 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit, Borucki said that though the newly-discovered planets are fairly similar to the Earth, they certainly "are no places to look for life. That will be coming later."

Kepler, which gazes at as many as 156,000 stars within 3,000 light-years of Earth for planets, identifies planets by spotting light-dipping eclipses, or "transits," of stars by their companion planets.