THE NASA Kepler space telescope's first ever potential planet discovery has officially been confirmed as an 'exoplanet'.
An exoplanet is a planet that is outside of our solar system and Nasa says this newly confirmed one is 60 times larger than the Sun.
The new exoplanet, referred to as Kepler-1658b, has had a long and rocky road to planet status confirmation.
Nasa has described it as a "massive hot Jupiter" that travels around its own version of our Sun every 3.85 days.
Initial estimations of the size of Kepler-1658 and its host star were wrong so the size of both of these celestial objects was massively underestimated.
Due to these inaccurate numbers, scientists kept changing Kepler-1658b's planet status from planet candidate to false positive and back again until new software was used to refine the data and reclassify it.
A team of researchers at the University of Hawaii went back through the Kepler telescope data and re-analysed it.
Lead author of the study Ashley Chontos said: "Our new analysis, which uses stellar sound waves observed in the Kepler data to characterise the star, demonstrated that the star is in fact three times larger than previously thought. This in turn means that the planet is three times larger, revealing that Kepler-1658b is actually a hot Jupiter."
This refined analysis allowed Kepler-1658b to finally be confirmed as a planet.
Kepler-1658b is one of the closest known planets orbiting a future version of our Sun and can teach us more about the host stars of exoplanets and the complex physics which causes planets to spiral into them.
The exoplanet's host star is 2600 light years from Earth.
Kepler is a now retired space telescope which was launched by NASA back in 2009 with the aim of discovering Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Since its launch, it has discovered thousands of exoplanets.
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What do you think about the new exoplanet? Let us know in the comments...