Machine learning and the Search for E.T. - DataScienceCentral.com

If there is life beyond Earth, it's going to be found on an exoplanet--planets orbiting stars other than our own sun. The number of exoplanets is thought to number in the trillions [1], but despite an abundance of data from exoplanet-finding missions like Kepler, K2, and TESS, just a few thousand potential exoplanets have been confirmed. The biggest problem is a glut of information; About 30 GB is being collected every day from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission [2], which launched in 2018. This gives astronomers an overwhelming amount of data to analyze. The sheer number of candidate stars, which stretches into the millions, confounds the problem and results in too many candidate exoplanets to manage without the assistance of ML.