Yesterday NASA announced the discovery of a couple of exoplanets around the Kepler-90 star that are similar ours with the help of machine learning or Artificial intelligence if you are more familiar with the term. The credits for this magnificent discovery goes to Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg who basically trained the computer leading to this result.
But what exactly did they found?
What they found is an eight planet solar system with a star like our sun that is called Kepler-90. The closest planet is Kepler-90i which is a rocky one with very high temperatures and 30% bigger than the earth. A full orbit takes approximately 14.4 days.
For all of the alien enthusiastic out there let me clarify that there is close to 0 possibility (always according to NASA that there is no life lurking around those planets.)
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So why is it considered an important finding although there is no life?
Here comes the best part guys. From what i read i strongly believe that the 2 main reasons that makes it so important and valuable if i may add are:
1. Progress: It may sound a bit confusing but i am here to make it simpler for you! By now NASA has achieved to discover a bunch of exoplanets,stars and solar systems similar to ours but this time the similarity is unique.
Let me explain why is that so
Kepler-90 has 8 exoplanets almost same as our solar system(we can argue about Pluto if it is a dwarf planet, a star or whatever) and with exactly the same order type as the smaller ones are on the inside and the bigger ones at the outside which brings out many questions such as "why solar systems with similar number of exoplanets looks like having signs of a more habitat nature?'' , '' similar type solar systems can prove alien life exists?'', '' how many solar systems like ours exist and why?''
those all are really great questions that i believe will be answered in an few years and the answers will surprise us
2. Artificial Intelligence: This is really huge as we all know that there are many attempts and serious ones that brought out real-time results of AI helping our lives and achieve great things, and this time is one of them. AI is used basically everywhere, from huge economic corporations to gaming and if you have no clue what it is think of it as "make the computer thinks of itself'' (don't be scared, the robot revolution is not gonna happen at least any time soon ;) ).
Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg as i mentioned trained the computer using Google's AI and merged neural networks to Kepler Data. Think of it like this, the data set consists of 35k planetary signals which were looked at by human eye or some auto testing with priority only to the ones with a strong signal as the others were harder to tracked down. As you understand this left out a lot of cases untouched which the work of Christopher and Andrew came to save the day and with 96% accuracy.