Chemical Patterns May Predict Stars That Host Giant Planets - Eos

Does this star have a planet? A new algorithm could help astronomers predict, on the basis of a star's chemical fingerprint, whether that star will host a giant gaseous exoplanet. "It's like Netflix," Natalie Hinkel, a planetary astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, told Eos. Netflix "sees that you like goofy comedy, science fiction, and kung fu movies--a variety of different patterns" to predict whether you'll like a new movie. Likewise, her team's machine learning algorithm "will learn which elements are influential in deciding whether or not a star has a planet."