How Deep Learning Will Speed Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Those gazing into the night sky have speculated about life beyond Earth since Zeus was a boy. Deep learning now holds the promise of zeroing in on an answer. A deep learning system devised by astronomers at University College London sifts through data from telescopes trained on faraway solar systems to detect planets with the potential to sustain life. "We want to know which planets are worth further study and which aren't, and we want to automate that," said Ingo Waldmann, the University College London post-doctoral researcher who leads the development team. He calls the GPU-accelerated deep learning program RobERt, short for Robotic Exoplanet Recognition.