NASA discovers a new solar system similar to ours!

Data from the Kepler Space Telescope has revealed the Kepler-90 system ties with our own for the most number of planets known to orbit a single star. The discovery of an eighth exoplanet, Kepler-90i, revolving around its Sun-like star located 2,545 light years away in the constellation of Draco, was achieved using artificial intelligence software programmed to detect the distinct light signature of planets passing in front of their parent star.

According to NASA, the discovery of Kepler-90i was the result of the work by researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg, who used an artificial "neural network" to examine the 35,000 possible planetary signals returned by the unmanned Kepler spacecraft. Artificial intelligence has been used before to process the Kepler data, but by imitating the way neurons connect in the human brain, Shallue and Vandenberg were able to train the computer to seek out and identify weak transit signals that had previously been missed.

The researchers used machine learning by training the neural network to identify transiting planets from 15,000 previously-vetted signals, which allowed the software to identify planets and eliminate false positives with a 96 percent accuracy. This made it possible for the team to examine 670 systems known to have multiple exoplanets on the assumption that these systems were most likely to show weak light curves of further planets.

The closest planet to its parent star, Kepler-90i completes its orbit every 14.4 days and is a rocky planet a third larger than Earth with a surface temperature of 427°C. And though the Kepler-90 system has as many planets as our solar system, it's much more compact, with the farthest out, Kepler-90h, only as far from its star as Earth is from the Sun.

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