UT Astronomer Discovers New Planets – Using Artificial Intelligence

Thursday afternoon, NASA announced a new discovery from its Kepler space telescope mission – the presence of two new exoplanets. While that alone isn't that remarkable, since Kepler has discovered and confirmed upwards of 2,300 exoplanets in distant solar systems, how scientists found those planets is noteworthy. Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, who worked on this discovery, says the planet was discovered using artificial intelligence. "Instead of using traditional methods to identify exoplanets, we've incorporated an advanced type of machine learning called a neural network to help identify planets and sort away the bad signals, the false positive signals from the real planets," he says. "It's a form of artificial intelligence, very loosely inspired by the structure of neurons in your brain."