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As in ours, Kepler’s small, rocky planets are closest to the sun and its gas giants farthest away. Already, the results from this deep data dive have been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.īut the number of worlds is not the only similarity between our solar system and the Kepler 90 system. “This is almost certainly an exoplanet,” Vanderburg said, with the odds of a false positive being 1 in 10,000. It has a shorter orbit than Mercury’s, completing a circle around its star once every two weeks. But it was strong enough for the AI, churning through 14 billion data points, to detect.Īstronomers are confident that the exoplanet exists and that its surface temperature could exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit. “You can think of the neurons as switches.” The U-shaped dip of Kepler 90i passing in front of its star was too weak a signal for human detection. “A neural network is loosely inspired by the structure of the human brain,” Shallue said. (Google and NASA have been collaborating for years in 2013, they unveiled the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, a machine-learning facility at the space agency’s Ames Research Center.) The scientists did not give the program, called a neural network, explicit instructions to find the characteristic curves of an exoplanet. With help from Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, Shallue developed a machine-learning program that detects light curves.
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#Kepler telescope glimpses freefloating planets software#
“The Kepler mission has so much data it is impossible to examine manually,” Christopher Shallue, a Google AI software engineer, explained during the briefing. When an exoplanet crosses in front of one of them, Kepler registers a subtle dip in that star’s sunlight.įishing for those dips within the massive database is a challenge. During that time it has brought in data from 150,000 stars. The Kepler telescope, which trails millions of miles behind Earth like a loyal pup, has gazed out into space since 2009. Get it from the Apple app store or the Google Play store. Reading this on your phone? Stay up to date with our free mobile app.