Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço

Astrophysicists use artificial intelligence to determine exoplanets sizes 2019 October 09 This artist's impression shows several of the planets orbiting the ultra-cool red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. KornmesserTrue radii as a function of the predicted radii for the test set. Credit: Ulmer-Moll et al.A team1 of Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA2) researchers has published an article3, led by Solène Ulmer-Moll, which shows that by knowing an exoplanet's mass and equilibrium temperature, it's possible to constrain its radius, with higher accuracy than previous methods. Solène Ulmer-Moll, a PhD student at the Science Faculty of the University of Porto (FCUP) explains this result was obtained by using knowledge from different fields: "This novel way to forecast exoplanet radius is a perfect example of the synergy between exoplanet science and machine learning techniques." To characterize a planet, both its mass and radius are needed, in order to find the planet's density, and from that infer its composition.