NASA, Google discover solar system just like ours

NASA, along with Google, recently declared that they have discovered another solar system similar to ours and that too with eight planets.

The news was announced on Thursday and is being called a ‘major discovery’. There was already a discovery about a star system called ‘Kepler-90’ that has seven planets. However, through Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) software, the astronomers found two new planets.

One of the two planets is the eighth addition to the Kepler-90 and is being called ‘Kepler-90i’. It is hot and rocky circling a star similar to the sun and is 2,545 light years away from Earth. The AI software used machine learning to go through the information recorded by NASA’s Kepler space telescope to find the planet, reported Business Insider.

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Kepler-90i is the third planet from its sun and orbits it once after every 14 days, but is not a place one can live on because of its extreme hot weather conditions (426°C). One of the astronomers Andrew Vanderburg said, “Kepler-90i is not a place I’d like to visit.”

However, this is a first time that any system has been discovered that has as many planets as ours, beating Trappist-1 that was previously the star system with most planets, with seven. “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.

“For the first time we know for sure the Solar System is not the sole record holder for the number of planets. Maybe there are systems out here with so many planets they make ours sound ordinary. It’s very possible that Kepler-90 has even more planets we might not even know about,” expressed Vanderburg.

The second exoplanet, the Kepler 80g, is a bit similar to the Trappist-1 system and seems to posses habitable environments.

In order to discover these planets, the Google team scanned weak signal through its network that were previously missed by humans. According to senior software engineer at Google AI, Christopher Shallue, the process was so easy, it took them only two hours to spot the planets. The researchers believe that AI will help make more discoveries in the future that are often missed by humans, reported Telegraph.