NASA Announces Eighth Planet around Distant Star, Tying Our Own Solar System

Megalith

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Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.

The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers “learn.” In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.
 
It should be every astronomer's sacred duty to restore Pluto to its rightful place as a planet so that we can be no. 1 again!
 
There's still a suspected 9th planet in our solar system it's just so far out we haven't located it yet. The gravitational effect on other planets has been measured though.
 
Time to up the ante and reclassify Pluto back to being a major planet !

That said, "machine learning" yeah I can see it. When I worked at NASA one of the big things I did was write a program to automatically sift through data to look for a particular signal greater than some value. Not exactly machine learning, but I was never that great of a programmer so it wasn't that complicated.
 
2500 light years? Sheesh why bother. That is the astrophysics version of BFE
 
Record Breaker! 8th Alien Planet Found Around Distant Star


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The discovery of an eighth planet around the star Kepler-90 marks the first time a star system has been found to have the same number of planets as our own solar system. NASA unveiled the discovery Dec. 14, 2017.
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel

Our solar system is not alone atop the planet-harboring heap anymore.

Scientists have discovered another world orbiting the star Kepler-90, bringing that system's tally of confirmed planets to eight — the same number as in Earth's solar system (at least according to the International Astronomical Union, which stripped Pluto of its "ninth planet" status back in 2006).

That's one more than the previous extrasolar record, which had been held jointly by Kepler-90 and the TRAPPIST-1 system.


A combination of Kepler Space Telescope data and artificial intelligence has tracked down an eighth planet around the star Kepler-90. It's the first star system that we know of that harbors 8 planets, other than our own. The planet's surface temperature is estimated to be 800 degrees farenheit.
Credit: NASA Ames Research Center


The research team found the new planet, known as Kepler-90i — as well as another world in a different system — after analyzing archival data from NASA's Kepler mission using Google machine-learning techniques.

"Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them," Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come."

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In the Kepler-90 system, all eight planets are closer to the host star than Earth is to the sun.
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel


The Kepler space telescope launched in March 2009. During its four-year original mission, the spacecraft scanned 150,000 stars continuously, searching for the tiny brightness dips caused by planets crossing the stars' faces. In 2014, Kepler shifted to a second mission known as K2, during which it hunts for exoplanets on a more limited basis but also makes a variety of other observations.

This planet-hunting work has been incredibly successful. To date, Kepler has discovered more than 2,500 confirmed alien worlds — about two-thirds of all known planets beyond our solar system — as well as more than 2,000 "candidates" that await confirmation by follow-up observations or analysis. (The vast majority of these finds have come from the original-mission observations; the K2 confirmed-planet tally stands at 184.)

But the two new discoveries suggest that many more alien worlds may lurk undiscovered in Kepler's data sets.

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The eight known exoplanets of the Kepler-90 star system mirrors the arrangement of our own solar system, with smaller planets closer to the parent star and larger worlds further away. NASA unveiled the discovery of the eighth known planet in the system, Kepler-90i, on Dec. 14, 2017.
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel


Researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg — a senior software engineer with Google AI and an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, respectively — trained a computer to recognize weak, as-yet-unnoticed exoplanet signals in Kepler data. The duo used a machine-learning approach, basing it on the networks of neurons that populate the human brain.

"In my spare time, I started googling for ‘finding exoplanets with large data sets’ and found out about the Kepler mission and the huge data set available," Shallue said in the same statement. "Machine learning really shines in situations where there is so much data that humans can't search it for themselves."

The scientists tested their software on 15,000 previously vetted Kepler signals, including both confirmed detections and false positives. Shallue and Vanderburg found that the artificial neural network identified such signals correctly 96 percent of the time.

So the researchers directed the network to search for additional weak signals in 670 star systems already known to host multiple planets, reasoning that such systems had a good chance of hosting additional, undiscovered worlds.

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The vast majority of known exoplanet systems harbor just one confirmed world. Kepler-90i offers hope that additional mulitplanet systems will be found.
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel and The University of Texas at Austin/Andrew Vanderburg


And they found two such planets, including Kepler-90i, which lies about 2,545 light-years from Earth. Kepler-90i is probably rocky, like Earth, and it's the third world out from its star, which is a bit hotter than our sun. But the similarities with our home planet probably end there: Kepler-90i completes one orbit every 14.4 Earth days and is therefore probably much too hot to host life. Indeed, average surface temperatures on the planet probably hover around 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius), Vanderburg said.

And the Kepler-90 system is far from an exact simulacrum of our own. Though its inner planets are rocky and outer ones are gaseous, this system is much more compact than our solar system — all eight Kepler-90 worlds are closer to their star than Earth is to the sun, the researchers said.

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Experts believe there may be more planets in the Kepler-90 system.
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel


These planets may have migrated inward, toward their host star, over time, they added. But the current configuration, strange as it may seem to us, appears to be relatively stable, Vanderburg said.

The star may host even more planets, he added.

"There's a lot of unexplored real estate in the Kepler-90 system, and it would almost be surprising to me if there weren't any more planets around this star," Vanderburg said during a news conference today (Dec. 14).

The other newfound world, known as Kepler-80g, is the sixth planet known in its system, which is centered around a dwarf star that lies about 1,160 light-years from the sun. Again, this extrasolar system is quite compact; Kepler-80g also takes about two Earth weeks to complete one orbit.

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Kepler has spotted over 30,000 signals of possible exoplanets. Researchers analyzed Kepler data from 670 multiplanet systems using Google machine-learning techniques and detected two more alien worlds — Kepler-90 and Kepler-80g.
Credit: NASA


Such work is probably just the beginning for machine-learning exoplanet discovery; Shallue and Vanderburg intend to apply their techniques to Keplerf's entire data set.

"These results demonstrate the enduring value of Kepler’s mission," Kepler project scientist Jessie Dotson, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in the same statement.

"New ways of looking at the data — such as this early-stage research to apply machine learning algorithms — promises to continue to yield significant advances in our understanding of planetary systems around other stars," Dotson added. "I'm sure there are more firsts in the data waiting for people to find them."

The new study has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.
 
There's still a suspected 9th planet in our solar system it's just so far out we haven't located it yet. The gravitational effect on other planets has been measured though.

yeah, it's called pluto ;)

nah i definitely think there was something out there that put pluto in the orbit it's in but was eventually destroyed to create what is now the kuiper belt.
 
will only take 2,545 years to go there and say hello in that next door neighborhood
 
will only take 2,545 years to go there and say hello in that next door neighborhood
Correction, it'll take 2545 years to send a signal that says "hello", and another 2545 years to wait for a response.
 
"a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days".......Good thing it's a rather useless planet.
 
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