NASA discovers exoplanet through Google machine learning
NASA has announced that an exoplanet has been discovered using machine learning from Google. Google’s artificial intelligence has discovered that there is an eighth planet orbiting the star Kepler-90 based on data from the Kepler space telescope.
Named Kepler-90i, the planet is located about 2,545 light-years from our solar system. The exoplanet was previously overlooked, although seven other planets had already been discovered near the star Kepler-90. This star’s system is the first outside our solar system to discover eight planets orbiting their star.
Two software engineers from Google came up with the idea of analyzing the data from the Kepler space telescope with a neural network. Kepler has collected a huge amount of data and has enough data for 35,000 signals from possible planets. This data is normally analyzed by automated tests and sometimes the human eye, but the weaker signals are sometimes missed.
The neural network was first trained to identify already discovered exoplanets with a TensorFlow model based on fifteen thousand previously searched signals from the Kepler space telescope. During a test, the artificial intelligence was able to recognize existing planets and false values in 96 percent of the cases. Google engineers concluded that the model worked.
A small dip in a star’s brightness as an exoplanet moves past the star is a sign that there is a planet. After the neural network learned to discover planets, the researchers used the model for 670 systems in which exoplanets had already been discovered. This was chosen because it was thought that the chance of discovering new planets is greatest in systems with more than one planet.
Based on the 14 billion data points created with the Kepler Space Telescope, Google’s AI can examine some 200,000 other stars in addition to the 670 stars it examined. It is therefore likely that even more exoplanets will be discovered in the future using this model from Google, based on existing data.
Using this method, a sixth planet was also discovered near the star Kepler-80: Kepler-80g. This exoplanet is about the size of Earth and orbits the star with other previously discovered planets in its vicinity. This planetary system is very compact, with the phenomenon of orbital resonance. Kepler-80 is located 1,100 light-years from Earth.
Kepler-90i orbits its star in 14.4 days and is not an interesting candidate for life. The rocky planet, which is thirty percent larger than Earth, is relatively close to Kepler-90 like the other seven planets. Moreover, this star is twenty percent larger and five percent warmer than our sun. According to NASA, the temperature on the surface is above 426 degrees Celsius, which is comparable to Mercury. The outermost planet, Kepler 90h, has an orbit comparable to Earth in distance from the star.
The research of the researchers from the American Harvard University is published in the scientific journal The Astronomical Journal, under the title ‘Identifying exoplanets with deep learning: a five planet resonant chain around Kepler-80 and an eighth planet around Kepler-90’.