Google Machine Learning Technology Helps NASA Discover New Exoplanet

The same machine learning approaches that Google is bringing to many of its enterprise technologies and products recently helped scientists at NASA discover two new planets far outside the solar system. One of the planets, Kepler-90i, is the eighth planet that NASA has discovered orbiting Kepler 90, a star that is very similar to the Sun some 2,545 light-years away from Earth. The discovery means that the solar system is not the only planetary system with eight planets circling a star, NASA said in a statement Thursday. Kepler-90i is about 30 percent larger than earth has a surface temperature of around 800 F and orbits its star once ever 14 days. Finding exoplanets can be enormously challenging even with the most sophisticated technologies.