For the first time in history, NASA has discovered a total of eight planets orbiting a distant star that is much like our Sun, the space agency announced on Thursday.
The star, Kepler-90, is 2,545 light-years from Earth and located in the Draco constellation. It is the first star known to humans to support just as many planets as the known Solar System, but what is exciting to many is that astronomers believe that this is in fact only the beginning of a long line of discoveries to come out of our latest technological advances.
For a time, researchers had known that a total of seven planets were orbiting Kepler-90, but Google Artificial Intelligence had a hand in discovering the eighth planet when it looked into archival data originally obtained by NASA’s Kepler telescope, designed specifically to look for planets.
With the idea of eventually differentiating among exoplanets, Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in California, and Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, trained a computer how to differentiate between images of cats and dogs, refining their approach to identify exoplanets in Kepler data based on the change in light when a planet passed in front of its star. The neural network learned to identify these by using signals that had been vetted and confirmed in Kepler’s planet catalog. Ninety-six percent of the time, it was accurate.