Scientists find a miniature version of our solar system, with eight planets and a sun-like star

Scientists applying artificial intelligence to data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope have discovered an eighth planet around the star Kepler-90 -- breaking the record for the star with the most exoplanets and, for the first time, tying with our own. The planet Kepler-90i, described at a briefing Thursday and in a paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, demonstrates for the first time that other stars can host planetary systems as populous as our own solar system. The findings also establish the growing role that neural networks and other machine learning techniques could play in the hunt for more elusive planets outside our own solar neighborhood. "Kepler has already shown us that most stars have planets," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington. "Today Kepler confirms that stars can have large families of planets just like our solar system." Kepler-90i sits around a sun-like star 2,545 light years away in the constellation Draco.