An international team of scientists announced Monday that 32 planets have been discovered outside Earth’s solar system through the use of a high-precision instrument installed at a Chilean telescope.

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. According to the European Southern Observatory statement, that tactic, known as the radial velocity method, “has been the most prolific method in the search for exoplanets.”

The observatory said that the instrument detects movements as small as 3.5 km/hr, a slow walking pace.

(article : CNN, photo source: Art of Greg Martin)