You may have heard of the Kepler space telescope. We owe him the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, even though he has not been among the active space telescopes since October 2018, due to a lack of fuel. I’ve been in space for nearly 10 years since I entered orbit.

Until recently, scientists counted 4,569 planets in our galaxy. To this number are added 301 new planets, discovered not by a space telescope, but by forms of artificial intelligence, which discovered the existence of these planets by analyzing the huge data that Kepler collected during the last part of his life in orbit.

Credits: Pixabay

In fact, these forms of artificial intelligence are deep neural networks that use machine learning and have been dubbed ExoMiner.

This AI will be more reliable than human experts

ExoMiner is a powerful deep neural network that powers NASA’s supercomputer that can detect real exoplanets. Hamid Valizadegan, ExoMiner Project Manager, asserts that “ When ExoMiner says that something is a planet, you can be sure that it is a planet. It is very accurate and, in some ways, more reliable than human experts ».

In all, the AI ​​”verified” 301 planets. However, none of these new planets will resemble Earth and will evolve within the habitable zone of their star. However, by modifying the AI, researchers can use ExoMiner to analyze data from other telescopes.