These are prime candidates around which to search for small exoplanets using the transit method.
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Its main objectives are to search for exoplanets and to study the interiors of stars.
The hunt for exoplanets has reached a pace that is difficult to keep up with.
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The Kepler space telescope has been the source of most of the known candidate exoplanets.
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Since the 1990s more than 300 exoplanets have been found and the number is growing.
It has been designed to spot exoplanets bigger than twice the size of the Earth.
Most searches for exoplanets have avoided such systems, because the presence of two stars complicates matters.
Often, exoplanets just get tugged from their orginal, near-circular orbits into more eccentric ones, the simulations showed.
But these are the first images of planets outside the Solar System, or exoplanets as they are called.
EChO will use spectroscopy to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, hoping to spot the tell-tale chemical signature of life.
This is a contrast from many of the exoplanets discovered using Kepler, which exhibit much more bizarre orbital behavior.
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The vast majority of exoplanets have been discovered using the radial velocity method.
Last month, scientists announced that Kepler had discovered two of the most intriguing candidates yet in the search for Earth-like exoplanets.
The Characterising Exoplanets Satellite -- or Cheops -- will target nearby, stars already known to have potential targets in their orbit.
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These three potentially habitable exoplanets may soon be joined by many more.
NASA's Kepler telescope has discovered three "super-Earth-size" exoplanets that are close enough to their stars to make them possibly suitable for water.
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The observatories will monitor regions of the galaxy continuously, in order to detect exoplanets as they pass between their host star and the Earth.
The discovery of exoplanets in binary and triple-star systems raises the prospect that the galaxy houses many more such objects than was previously thought.
The new planet around Alpha Centauri B matches Earth only in terms of its mass - making it among the smallest exoplanets we know of.
This discovery more closely resembles other exoplanets found to date, except KELT-2Ab's parent star is so bright it can be seen from Earth through binoculars.
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It should be capable of detecting exoplanets smaller than the Earth.
As of April 19, 2013, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Planet Quest website reports 851 confirmed planets and 2781 candidates, totaling as many as 3, 632 exoplanets.
It's an astonishing achievement by any standards, but Kepler's enduring legacy may be much more profound that its contribution to a simple head count of exoplanets.
Finding out just how common exoplanets are particularly the rocky, Earth-like sort will be the task of two space-based telescopes to be launched within the next couple of years.
"Statements about a planet's habitability always depend on assumptions, " said Lisa Kaltenegger, an expert on the likely atmospheres of "exoplanets" and a member of the discovery group.
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They hope to detect hundreds of such exoplanets and, in so doing, learn more about how new worlds and even life itself might emerge from dust and debris.
The researchers also looked at orbital eccentricities of actual exoplanets.
In fact, the first few hundred exoplanets were found by the "radial velocity" technique, which detects tiny motions of a star as it and its planets orbit one another.
NASA's Kepler observatory is designed to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and civilizations traces of exoplanets and has clocked up around two thousand unconfirmed sightings.
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