(CNN) -- Thirty-two planets have been discovered outside Earth's solar system through the use of a high-precision instrument installed at a Chilean telescope, an international team announced Monday.
The existence of the so-called exoplanets -- planets outside our solar system -- was announced at the European Southern Observatory/Center for Astrophysics, University of Porto conference in Porto, Portugal, according to a statement issued by the observatory.
The announcement was made by a consortium of international researchers, headed by the Geneva Observatory, who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS. The device can detect slight wobbles of stars as they respond to tugs from exoplanets' gravity. That tactic, known as the radial velocity method, "has been the most prolific method in the search for exoplanets," according to the European Southern Observatory statement.
The instrument detects movements as small as 3.5 km/hr (2.1 mph), a slow walking pace, the observatory said.
Two of the "Super-Earths" - thought to be rocky planets like Earth and not gas giants - orbit stars like our sun, and the other two orbit smaller "M" class stars, dimmer and redder than the sun.
So "we have yet to find firm evidence for a habitable, Earth-mass planet," Boss says. But he says the Super-Earth detections suggest that upcoming planet hunts, including NASA's Kepler spacecraft, should find "lots of Earths."