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 exoplanet detection


Exoplanet Detection Using Machine Learning Models Trained on Synthetic Light Curves

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With manual searching processes, the rate at which scientists and astronomers discover exoplanets is slow because of inefficiencies that require an extensive time of laborious inspections. In fact, as of now there have been about only 5,000 confirmed exoplanets since the late 1900s. Recently, machine learning (ML) has proven to be extremely valuable and efficient in various fields, capable of processing massive amounts of data in addition to increasing its accuracy by learning. Though ML models for discovering exoplanets owned by large corporations (e.g. NASA) exist already, they largely depend on complex algorithms and supercomputers. In an effort to reduce such complexities, in this paper, we report the results and potential benefits of various, well-known ML models in the discovery and validation of extrasolar planets. The ML models that are examined in this study include logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, and random forest. The dataset on which the models train and predict is acquired from NASA's Kepler space telescope. The initial results show promising scores for each model. However, potential biases and dataset imbalances necessitate the use of data augmentation techniques to further ensure fairer predictions and improved generalization. This study concludes that, in the context of searching for exoplanets, data augmentation techniques significantly improve the recall and precision, while the accuracy varies for each model.


Advanced Modeling for Exoplanet Detection and Characterization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Research into light curves from stars (temporal variation of brightness) has completely changed how exoplanets are discovered or characterised. This study including star light curves from the Kepler dataset as a way to discover exoplanets (planetary transits) and derive some estimate of their physical characteristics by the light curve and machine learning methods. The dataset consists of measured flux (recordings) for many individual stars and we will examine the light curve of each star and look for periodic dips in brightness due to an astronomical body making a transit. We will apply variables derived from an established method for deriving measurements from light curve data to derive key parameters related to the planet we observed during the transit, such as distance to the host star, orbital period, radius. The orbital period will typically be measured based on the time between transit of the subsequent timelines and the radius will be measured based on the depth of transit. The density of the star and planet can also be estimated from the transit event, as well as very limited information on the albedo (reflectivity) and atmosphere of the planet based on transmission spectroscopy and/or the analysis of phase curve for levels of flux. In addition to these methods, we will employ some machine learning classification of the stars (i.e. likely have an exoplanet or likely do not have an exoplanet) based on flux change. This could help fulfil both the process of looking for exoplanets more efficient as well as providing important parameters for the planet. This will provide a much quicker means of searching the vast astronomical datasets for the likelihood of exoplanets.


A New Statistical Model of Star Speckles for Learning to Detect and Characterize Exoplanets in Direct Imaging Observations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The search for exoplanets is an active field in astronomy, with direct imaging as one of the most challenging methods due to faint exoplanet signals buried within stronger residual starlight. Successful detection requires advanced image processing to separate the exoplanet signal from this nuisance component. This paper presents a novel statistical model that captures nuisance fluctuations using a multi-scale approach, leveraging problem symmetries and a joint spectral channel representation grounded in physical principles. Our model integrates into an interpretable, end-to-end learnable framework for simultaneous exoplanet detection and flux estimation. The proposed algorithm is evaluated against the state of the art using datasets from the SPHERE instrument operating at the Very Large Telescope (VLT). It significantly improves the precision-recall trade-off, notably on challenging datasets that are otherwise unusable by astronomers. The proposed approach is computationally efficient, robust to varying data quality, and well suited for large-scale observational surveys.


Combining multi-spectral data with statistical and deep-learning models for improved exoplanet detection in direct imaging at high contrast

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Exoplanet detection by direct imaging is a difficult task: the faint signals from the objects of interest are buried under a spatially structured nuisance component induced by the host star. The exoplanet signals can only be identified when combining several observations with dedicated detection algorithms. In contrast to most of existing methods, we propose to learn a model of the spatial, temporal and spectral characteristics of the nuisance, directly from the observations. In a pre-processing step, a statistical model of their correlations is built locally, and the data are centered and whitened to improve both their stationarity and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A convolutional neural network (CNN) is then trained in a supervised fashion to detect the residual signature of synthetic sources in the pre-processed images. Our method leads to a better trade-off between precision and recall than standard approaches in the field. It also outperforms a state-of-the-art algorithm based solely on a statistical framework. Besides, the exploitation of the spectral diversity improves the performance compared to a similar model built solely from spatio-temporal data.


Exoplanet Detection by Machine Learning with Data Augmentation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

It has recently been demonstrated that deep learning has significant potential to automate parts of the exoplanet detection pipeline using light curve data from satellites such as Kepler \cite{borucki2010kepler} \cite{koch2010kepler} and NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) \cite{ricker2010transiting}. Unfortunately, the smallness of the available datasets makes it difficult to realize the level of performance one expects from powerful network architectures. In this paper, we investigate the use of data augmentation techniques on light curve data from to train neural networks to identify exoplanets. The augmentation techniques used are of two classes: Simple (e.g. additive noise augmentation) and learning-based (e.g. first training a GAN \cite{goodfellow2020generative} to generate new examples). We demonstrate that data augmentation has a potential to improve model performance for the exoplanet detection problem, and recommend the use of augmentation based on generative models as more data becomes available.


ExoSGAN and ExoACGAN: Exoplanet Detection Using Adversarial Training Algorithms - Astrobiology

#artificialintelligence

Exoplanet detection opens the door to the discovery of new habitable worlds and helps us understand how planets were formed. With the objective of finding earth-like habitable planets, NASA launched Kepler space telescope and its follow up mission K2. The advancement of observation capabilities has increased the range of fresh data available for research, and manually handling them is both time-consuming and difficult. Machine learning and deep learning techniques can greatly assist in lowering human efforts to process the vast array of data produced by the modern instruments of these exoplanet programs in an economical and unbiased manner. However, care should be taken to detect all the exoplanets precisely while simultaneously minimizing the misclassification of non-exoplanet stars.


Machine learning and the Search for E.T.

#artificialintelligence

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 thousands of 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. In addition, 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.


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

#artificialintelligence

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.


Exoplanet Detection using Machine Learning

#artificialintelligence

We introduce a new machine learning based technique to detect exoplanets using the transit method.


Exoplanet Detection using Machine Learning

#artificialintelligence

We introduce a new machine learning based technique to detect exoplanets using the transit method. Machine learning and deep learning techniques have proven to be broadly applicable in various scientific research areas. We aim to exploit some of these methods to improve the conventional algorithm based approach used in astrophysics today to detect exoplanets. We used the popular time-series analysis library'TSFresh' to extract features from lightcurves. For each lightcurve, we extracted 789 features.