A team of astronomers including a San Francisco State University researcher has discovered a new planet orbiting a pair of stars. The planet known as Kepler-453b is located within its host stars'"habitable zone," the area around the stars in which life could potentially exist.

Stephen Kane, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University and member of the team said in the statement that the discovery of this new planet is an indication that there could be some more planets like it.

Kane said, "If we had observed this planet earlier or later than we did, we would have seen nothing and assumed there was no planet there. That suggests that there are a lot more of these kinds of planets than we are thinking, and we're just looking at the wrong time".

The details about the discovery of the new planet are being detailed in an article which has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Members of the team revealed that details of the discovery will be announced by San Diego State University Professor William Welsh on Friday at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Honolulu.

As per researchers, Kepler453b blocks 0.5% of its host stars' light during the transit, and knowing this has enabled them to calculate that the planet's radius is 6.2 times that of Earth, or about 60% larger than Neptune.

Furthermore, researchers said that the huge size of the planet indicates that it is a gas giant, rather than a rocky planet.

The larger host star of Kepler-453b is about 94% the size of our sun, and the smaller star is only 20% the size of our sun. The smaller star is much cooler, and emits less than 1% of the larger star's energy. It takes nearly about 240 days for Kepler-453b to orbit its host stars.