NASA spots eighth planet in solar system
Washington Dec 15 (IANS) NASA has announced the discovery of an eight planet orbiting Kepler-90 a star comparable to the Sun located 2 545 light-years from the Earth.
Researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg detected the planet dubbed Kepler-90i by applying Google s machine-learning technology to data collected by NASA s Kepler Space Telescope the US space agency said on Thursday Efe news reported.
With the discovery of an 8th planet orbiting another star 2,500 light years away, we now have another solar system that ties ours for number of worlds! Learn about the #Kepler90 system: https://t.co/AcSamwh07g pic.twitter.com/S50CPwjfOm
— NASA (@NASA) December 14, 2017
With eight planets the Kepler-90 system equals our own system in terms of the number of planets orbiting a single star. Astronomers have yet to detect a system with more than eight planets.
Kepler-90i is thought to have an average surface temperature of 425 degrees Celsius. The outermost planet in the system Kepler-90h is roughly the same distance from its star as the Earth is from the Sun.
Astrokomrade AKA Randy Bresnik is back to earth as he landed safe, his parachutes landed in Kazakhstan.
"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 " Vanderburg a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow and astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin said in a statement.
The notion of using artificial intelligence to analyze data from the Kepler telescope originated with Shallue a senior software engineer with Google s AI research team.
"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. "Machine learning really shines in situations where there is so much data that humans can t search it for themselves."
Paul Hertz head of NASA s Astrophysics Division in Washington hailed the find.
"Just as we expected there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them " he said.
--IANS
pgh/
