Science AMA Series: We’re planet hunters from NASA, Google AI, and The
University of Texas, Austin. Ask us anything!
Abstract
Ask us about NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope’s latest
discovery, which was made using machine learning from Google. Machine
learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new
ways of analyzing Kepler data. Please post your questions here. We’ll be
online from 12:00-1:30 pm PT (3:00-4:30 pm ET, 20:00-21:30 UTC), and
will sign our answers. Ask us anything! Paul Hertz, Astrophysics
Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington Christopher
Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in Mountain View,
California Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral
Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin Jessie Dotson, Kepler project
scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley
Kartik Sheth, program scientist, Astrophysics Division at NASA
Headquarters in Washington UPDATE (10:44 am PT): Today, December 14,
2017, researchers announced our solar system now is tied for most number
of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth
planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth.
The planet was discovered in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
For more info about the discovery, visit
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/artificial-intelligence-and-nasa-data-used-to-discover-eighth-planet-circling-distant
The newly-discovered Kepler-90i –a sizzling hot, rocky planet that
orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning
from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence
in which computers “learn.” In this case, computers learned to
identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope
recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as
exoplanets. The discovery came about after researchers Andrew Vanderburg
and Christopher Shallue trained a computer to learn how to identify
exoplanets in the light readings recorded by Kepler – the miniscule
change in brightness captured when a planet passed in front of, or
transited, a star. Inspired by the way neurons connect in the human
brain, this artificial “neural network” sifted through Kepler data and
found weak transit signals from a previously-missed eighth planet
orbiting Kepler-90, in the constellation Draco. We’ll be back to answer
your questions at 12 pm PT. Ask us anything! UPDATE (1:40 pm PT): That’s
all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining us. To learn more
about NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, visit
www.nasa.gov/kepler. Follow us on social media at
https://twitter.com/nasakepler and
https://www.facebook.com/NASAsKeplerMission/. Proof:
https://twitter.com/NASAKepler/status/941406190046552065