An 8th Planet Is Found Orbiting a Distant Star, With A.I.'s Help

With eight planets whirling around its sun, our solar system has held the galactic title for having the most known planets of any star system in the Milky Way. But on Thursday NASA announced the discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting a distant star some 2,500 light years away from here called Kepler 90, bringing that system's total to eight planets as well. The new planet, known as Kepler-90i, is rocky and hot. The finding was made using data collected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, a planet hunter that has spotted more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets since its launch in 2009. Unlike those previousdiscoveries, the new exoplanet was detected with the help of artificial intelligence researchers at Google using a machine learning technique called neural networking.