An artist's rendering of how one exoplanet might look.

(NASA/JPL-CALTECH)

A team of researchers have found that at least half of the known exoplanets– planets outside our solar system– may not actually be planets at all.

Scientists told the Extreme Solar Systems III conference that are false positives, Science Magazine reported. These celestial bodies, previously believed to be planets, may actually be groupings of failed stars, known as brown dwarfs, orbiting one another, the scientists also said.

The discovery was made by a team of researchers that have followed NASA's Kepler mission, which has attempted to locate as many exoplanets as possible, Science Magazine added.

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"It was thought that the reliability of the Kepler exoplanets detection was very good – ," Alexandre Santerne, one of the scientists who performed the study, said at the conference. "Our extensive spectroscopic survey of the largest exoplanets discovered by Kepler shows that this percentage is much higher, even above 50 percent. This has strong implications in our understanding of the exoplanet population in the Kepler field."

The study on the Kepler list of possible exoplanets from July 2010 through July 2015, Phys.org said. The new findings would dramatically reduce the number of possible known planets suitable for life, but with nearly , there will be plenty of places to explore, should we ever develop the technology to reach those distances.

"Detecting and characterizing planets is usually a very subtle and difficult task," study team member Vardan Adibekyan said during the conference. "In this work, we showed that even big, easy-to-detect planets are also difficult to deal with."

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Saint George Basin, Australia (JAXA/European Space Agency)