NASA Finds Solar System Filled With As Many Planets as Our Own

Local Editor

NASA found an entire solar system with as many planets as our own.

The discovery of a new planet around the Kepler-90 star, which looks like our own sun, means the distant solar system has a total of eight known planets. And those planets look like those in our own neighborhood: rocky planets orbit close to the star, with gas giants further away.

The star and its family of planets were already known about, having been detected by the Kepler space telescope. But the breakthrough came when astronomers found the new world, which was done using Google's artificial intelligence technology.

A computer was trained to look through the data from the Kepler space telescope, and look for signals that might belong to planets.

It found new planets within existing systems, by spotting signals that seemed to indicate something of interest but were too weak to have been spotted by humans.

That suggests that there might be whole worlds and solar systems hiding within the data we've already collected, but which we had not noticed because there are simply so many signals to pick through.

Kepler collected four-years of data from looking at the sky and 150,000 stars - far more than humans could ever look through.

"Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division in Washington.

"This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team