Artificial Intelligence Identifies 50 New Planets

Scientists in the United Kingdom have developed artificial intelligence that has identified 50 new planets. The University of Warwick says a new machine learning algorithm developed by astronomers and computer scientists at the school and The Alan Turing Institute identified the exoplanets by examining data from NASA's now-retired Kepler telescope mission. The results are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers generally sift through large amounts of telescope data looking for a dip in light to indicate a planet passing between the telescope and its star. However, among the thousands of planetary candidates, there are many false positives caused by a binary star system, interference from an object in the background or camera errors.