Artificial Intelligence Discovers A New Planet Outside Our Solar System

A research team employed machine learning technologies to find evidence of a previously undiscovered planet outside of our solar system.

Scientists have developed a new method that could revolutionise how they find and classify new planets that are very far away from Earth. They have detected an exoplanet using machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence.

A recent study by the University of Georgia research team showed that machine learning can correctly determine if an exoplanet is present by looking in protoplanetary disks, the gas around newly formed stars. The newly published findings represent a first step towards using machine learning to identify previously overlooked exoplanets.

"We confirmed the planet using traditional techniques, but our models directed us to run those simulations and showed us exactly where the planet might be," said lead author of the study Jason Terry in a release.

"When we applied our models to a set of older observations, they identified a disk that wasn't known to have a planet despite having already been analyzed. Like previous discoveries, we ran simulations of the disk and found that a planet could re-create the observation."