NASA uses Google's AI to find the eighth planet in a distant solar system

This discovery helps this distant Solar System to have the number of planets on par with our Solar System.

Researchers from the US aerospace agency (NASA) and technology giant Google have joined hands to teach a computer how to handle large amounts of data generated from.

The solar system has just been discovered compared to our solar system.

NASA announced the application of artificial intelligence to processing data generated by the Kepler telescope that helped discover a new planet in the Kepler-90 Solar System , making it the largest planetary system. ever discovered.

The newly discovered planet is called Kepler-90i , orbiting the star Kepler-90 and about 2,545 light-years from Earth (a light-year equivalent to 9.5 trillion km). This rock planet is closer to its sun than Earth and has a long rotation period of only 14.4 days.

Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas, who participated in the project, said: 'The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our Solar System. It has small planets inside and large planets that spin outside, but they are very close to each other. '

NASA estimates the planet's surface temperature is about 426 degrees Celsius and indicates it is nearly lifeless. Many solar systems with fewer planets have been discovered over the years, but Kepler-90 is the first solar system to have eight planets like us.

Kepler-90i was discovered by training a computer so that it could scan a large amount of stellar data collected by NASA's Kepler telescope, which has helped detect more than 150,000 stars since its inception. in 2009.

The Solar System has been discovered to classify according to its planetary number.

Vanderburg and Google's AI engineer Christopher Shallue taught the computer to look at about 35,000 planetary signals that Kepler collected and determine when the transmission signal was blurred. This happens when a planet passes through, or 'transits' , in front of a star Kepler watches. The computer then discovered that weak signals were ignored and indicated the existence of the eighth planet: Kepler-90i .

Shallue said he was very interested in adopting Google's artificial intelligence in astronomy: 'The Kepler telescope has collected so much information that scientists cannot test themselves by hand. OK. The computer's self-learning ability really shines when there is too much data for people to consider themselves. '

Although machine learning capabilities have been used for Kepler's data for a long time, this is considered the first time this technology has helped discover a new world. This application then also helped researchers identify the sixth planet in Kepler-80, another Solar System.

According to AP, Shallue also said that Google intends to publicize the project source code so that free researchers can operate them at home along with the Kepler Telescope's public data.