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Astronomers have identified eight new exoplanets in distant solar systems and believe them to be in the habitable ‘Goldilocks’ zone of their parent stars.

Of the eight planets identified, two of them are Earth-like, Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, the scientists said.

The Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b orbit red dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than Sun.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics lead author Guillermo Torres said: "Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth."

Kepler-438b is said to be 12% larger and receive 40% more light than Earth, while Kepler-442b is about one-third larger than earth and gets around two-thirds as much light as Earth, according to the team.

Torres said: "For our calculations, we chose to adopt the broadest possible limits that can plausibly lead to suitable conditions for life."

"For our calculations, we chose to adopt the broadest possible limits that can plausibly lead to suitable conditions for life."

Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b are believed to be located 470 and 1,100 light-years respectively from Earth.

Kepler-186f and Kepler-62f were previously identified as the two most Earth-like planets.

All these planets are too small to confirm by measuring their masses. The team used a computer programme called BLENDER to identify whether they are statistically likely to be planets.

After the analysis, astronomers worked on data such as high-resolution spectroscopy, adaptive optics imaging, and speckle interferometry, to characterise the systems.

Astronomers said: "Those follow-up observations also revealed that four of the newly validated planets are in multiple-star systems. However, the companion stars are distant and don’t significantly influence the planets.

"As with many Kepler discoveries, the newly found planets are distant enough to make additional observations challenging."

Image: Two of the eight new exoplanets discovered are most Earth-like. Photo: courtesy of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.