A group of astronomers announced on Tuesday the discovery of 50 new planets. The planets, which includes 16 that have bigger mass than Earth, were found using a telescope in Chile's La Silla Observatory.

The previously unknown exoplanets were made public at the Extreme Solar Systems meeting in Wyoming, U.S., and will be written up in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal.

The 50 is the largest group revealed simultaneously and bring to almost 600 the total number of known extrasolar planets.

Astronomer Michel Mayor from Switzerland's Geneva University, the team leader, said that 16 of the newly discovered plants have a mass one to 10 times that of Earth's.

One of the super-Earths orbits inside a habitable zone, which is the narrow strip around a star where conditions such as the presence of liquid water on the surface of the planet to possibly make it hospitable to life. Called HD 85512 b, the planet's size is estimated to be 3.6 times the Earth's mass.

"The planets will be among the best targets for future space telescopes to look for signs of life in the planet's atmosphere by looking for chemical signatures such as evidence of oxygen," Francesco Pepe from the Geneva Observatory, who contributed to the research, told the BBC.

The astronomers used a precision instrument called the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher which was installed on the 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla.

"This is good news for those hoping to find some company in the galaxy," Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute senior Astronomer Seth Shostak told The Australian.

Shostak said more planets are likely to be discovered in 2012 by astronomers by using the Kepler telescope of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The telescope could determine the fraction of stars with planets that could support life, which Shostak estimated to range from 1 to 10 per cent.