Google and NASA scientist claims, two new planets in solar system

For the first time in history, NASA has discovered eight planets orbiting a distant star named Kepler-90 which is located 2,545 light-years from Earth in the Draco constellation.

If you want to search for planets among Kepler's weaker signals - which are far more numerous - then that haystack gets "much, much larger", he added.
Using machine learning and neural networks to achieve something humans could not, weak signal data from NASA's Kepler space telescope was scrutinized using Google machine learning technology to make the discovery. According to them, it is small, "sizzling" hot and rocky, and it takes 14.4 Earth-days to surround its star. They essentially trained a computer to identify exoplanets based on Kepler's observations in changing stellar brightness — the subtle, fleeting dip in a star's brightness when a planet passes in front of it.
An artist's concept depicts select planetary discoveries made to date by NASA's Kepler space telescope.
The data came from the Kepler telescope which NASA launched into space in 2009 as part of a planet-finding mission that is expected to end next year as the spacecraft runs out of fuel. "Today, Kepler confirms that stars can have large families of planets just like our solar system".
Unlike our own solar system however, the chances of life being on the eighth planet are slim as while it is about 30pc larger than our own planet, Kepler-90i is so close to its star that its average surface temperature is believed to exceed 400C, on a par with Mercury.
Kepler-90 is the first known star system besides our own that has eight planets, but scientists say it won't be the last.
"There's a lot of unexplored real estate in the Kepler-90 system", Vanderburg said, "and it would nearly be surprising to me if there weren't any more planets around this star".
Shallue teamed up with astronomer Andrew Vanderburg of the University of Texas at Austin to develop the program.
The findings also establish the growing role that neural networks and other machine learning techniques could play in the hunt for more elusive planets outside our own solar neighbourhood.
Although Kepler-90 is a sun-like star, the planets are all bunched together in tight orbits around it - the same distance that Earth is from the sun.
It was discovered using machine learning technology from Google, which spots patterns in data sets, to sift through old Kepler data.
What is Kepler-90i like? In the test set, the neural network correctly identified true planets and false positives 96 percent of the time.
Besides, he said that this information would be a "treasure trove" that other experts will be able to use fpr further research.
If the researchers lose track of weaker signals or miss them, they would also be losing the possibility to find new exoplanets. Five of the six planets form a resonant chain, in which they are locked in orbit by mutual gravity.
The research paper reporting this finding has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.
"These results demonstrate the enduring value of Kepler's mission", said Jessie Dotson, Kepler's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
Kepler has produced an unprecedented data set for exoplanet hunting.
Researchers had known that seven planets were orbiting the star.

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