NASA New Planet News: Kepler-90 Becomes 'Mini Version of Our Solar System' After Emergence of Eighth Planet
NASA has discovered an eighth planet in the Kepler-90 star system, making it a "mini version" of our solar system.
The eighth planet, which was officially named Kepler-90i, was uncovered in the copious amounts of data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and is described as a "sizzling hot, rocky" planet orbiting its Sun-like star once every 14.4 days.
The Kepler-90i is "about 30 percent larger" than our planet, but it is more Mercury than Earth seeing that it is likely to sustain life since it is so close to its star. Its average surface temperature goes beyond 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is on par with the first planet in our solar system.
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The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system. You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer.
The discovery was made owing to the process of machine learning from Google, an approach in which computers are trained to "learn." NASA explains of the new Kepler-90 planet's discovery:
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.
Researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg are credited for training the computers to learn to identify exoplanets in the light readings recorded by Kepler.
They believe that with 35,000 possible planetary signals available in the data, automated tests and human eyes often overlooked weaker signals like those emitted from the newly discovered planet.
The computer uncovering infinitesimal change in brightness from the planet, whose weak transit signals made it difficult to detect the first time around, paved the way for Kepler-90i to show itself.
NASA's Astrophysics Washington Division director Paul Hertz said that the feat is just the tip of the iceberg:
Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them. This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come.
He believes that machine learning promises the possibility of discovering more distant worlds based on the signals they transmit no matter how weak they may be.
Apart from the Kepler-90i, the process also allowed the researchers to uncover a sixth planet on par with Earth's size in the Kepler-80 system in addition to four neighboring planets.
