NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered an eighth planet in a distant star system called Kepler 90 – the first time a faraway star has been found to have the same number of planets orbiting it as our own sun.
Although the Kepler 90 solar system is not new, the eighth planet, Kepler 90i, is, after it was found using AI software in a groundbreaking project between Google and NASA.
The discovery of a system similar to our own raises hopes of finding alien life elsewhere in the universe.
The Kepler-90 planets have a similar configuration to our solar system, with small planets orbiting close to their star and the larger planets found farther away.
According to NASA, this confirms for the first time that distant star systems can be home to ‘families as large as our own.’
The new planet, estimated to be about 30 percent larger than Earth, is ‘not a place you’d like to visit,’ said Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin.
‘It is probably rocky, and doesn’t have a thick atmosphere’. And, temperatures at the surface are ‘scorching.’
According to Vanderburg, the average surface temperature is likely around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Kepler planet hunting satellite has been searching the stars for distant worlds using Google’s AI system, which used machine learning to ‘find’ planets in the Kepler data with up to 96 percent accuracy.
Neural networks can be trained on huge amounts of data to determine the difference between objects with great accuracy, the team explained in the teleconference.
Much like an AI can learn to spot the difference between cats and dogs, it can spot the difference between patterns associated with planets, and other types of patterns in the cosmos that could be false positives.
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