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(Image: NASA)
An eighth planet orbiting a Sun-like star over 2,500 light years away called Kepler-90 has been detected by running the data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope through a Google neural network.
The network was trained using 15,000 previously vetted signals from the Kepler exoplanet catalogue, NASA explained, before it moved on to learning how to detect weaker signals.
“We got lots of false positives of planets, but also potentially more real planets,” said NASA Sagan postdoctoral fellow Andrew Vanderburg. “It’s like sifting through rocks to find jewels. If you have a finer sieve, then you will catch more rocks but you might catch more jewels, as well.”
In addition to the new planet around Kepler-90, the network found a new Earth-sized planet orbiting Kepler-80.
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It is intended for the network to examine the full dataset from Kepler, which consists of more than 150,000 stars.
“Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington. “This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come.”
In a paper, the research team say the neural network ranks planet candidates above false positives 98.8 percent of the time.
“A technique like ours could be used in the future to make more accurate estimates of planetary occurrence rates. In particular, the occurrence rate of Earth-like planets, colloquially called ‘η-Earth’, is one of the most important and exciting open questions in exoplanet research — it is directly proportional to the estimated fraction of planets that might harbor life as we know it on Earth,” the paper said.
On a more terrestrial level, Google is pushing its machine learning into additional areas.
In October, the search giant announced a partnership with Rolls Royce to work on autonomous ships. The deal sees Rolls Royce use Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine to train its object classification system for detecting, identifying, and tracking the objects that a vessel can encounter at sea.
Google is also continuing to push machine learning in its more regular product set, with its Sheets app now able to suggest pivot tables from a simple natural language query.
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