Artificial intelligence just helped NASA find our solar system's mini-me

Further blurring the lines between science and science-fiction, an artificial intelligence system leveraged by NASA has discovered two previously unknown exoplanets. One of the new exoplanets, a sizzling rocky world called Kepler-90i, is significant because it brings the known planets orbiting its star to eight, and it's the first time a numerical twin to our solar system has ever been detected. "The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system," Andrew Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow and astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer." Kepler-90 is a sun-like star, but all of its eight planets are scrunched into the equivalent distance of Earth to the sun.