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NASA said Thursday its Kepler space telescope mission has confirmed 26 new planets outside the solar system, all of them orbiting too close to their host stars to sustain life.

The findings nearly double the number of confirmed planets that Kepler has found since 2009. Scattered across 11 planetary systems, their temperatures would be too hot for survival, as they all circle their stars closer than Venus. The planets orbit their stars between every six and 143 days.

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA headquarters. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates,” he added.

“This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

In December last year, NASA announced Kepler had confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside the solar system, Kepler 22b. Such planets have the right distance from their star to support water, plus a suitable temperature and atmosphere to support life. Kepler 22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, is 600 light years away, and orbits its Sun-like star every 290 days.

Astronomers have also discovered the three smallest planets ever found beyond the solar system, and the smallest is the size of Mars, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope to observe flickers from a star called KOI-961, the scientists discovered planets about .78, .73, and .57 times as large as Earth, the agency said in a press release.

Comets are vaporized by the sun daily, but this was the first time technology has allowed NASA to observe a comet being vaporized as it approached the sun, the space agency reported.

In an article published in this month’s Science, NASA said its Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded Comet C/2011 N3 nearing the sun and burning to nothing over a 20-minute span in July. NASA describes the event as “Comet corpses in the solar wind.”

The comet was about the size of an aircraft carrier and was part of the Kreutz family of comets believed to be remnants of a giant parent comet that broke apart some 2,500 years ago, the report said.