BREAKTHROUGH: AI Finds Incredible Planets Better For Life Than Earth

 

as humanity is becoming more and more advanced we are also becoming more and more curious to find out what is stored in the galaxy apart from us for the last 30 years we have been discovering planets outside our solar

 system in hopes of finding alien life

 a second home for humans or planets that can help us unlock the mysteries of the universe and fortunately now we have artificial

 intelligence doing it for us welcome to phenomenal let's find out how ai is helping us discover exciting exoplanets in the galaxy since the dawn of humanity humans have looked up to the night sky and wondered what lies in the space beyond the stars since that moment we've realized the earth is not the center of the universe and we understand how star systems and galaxies work and we've been searching the endless space as far as our site can reach in the universe our own galaxy the milky way has hundreds of billions of stars and those billions of stars are harboring hundreds of billions of planets so when we look up in the sky it's only natural to think about planets planets where we can live or planets that are already teeming with life and perhaps super advanced civilizations and what they may think about us since the end of the 1980s humans have been searching for planets that are not our neighbors and live far away orbiting stars other than our sun the exoplanets it all started with the launch and deployment of the hubble telescope in 1990 named after edwin hubble who proved the existence of other galaxies in the universe in 1923 the hubble telescope made huge strides in measuring the accurate distance between space bodies and determining how the universe would have been in its early years but the first exoplanet or we should say exoplanets were discovered by the polish astronomer alexander volkskin in 1992 breaking all the theories and beliefs about how planets are formed and behave these rocky planets revolve around a pulsar and not a star and in the last 30 years we have deployed more telescopes in space such as kepler spitzer and tess by nasa most by csa and gaia and chiops by the european space agency which has helped us find possibly 5 000 more exoplanets in our galaxy but how do they do that how can these telescopes peer through vast and crowded space to discern objects way beyond our reach well they actually have more than one trick to accomplish these astonishing discoveries most planets are found via the transit method it is the same method that was used to find the trappist-1 planets a solar system that is like a mini version of our solar system with seven earth-like planets in fact the word trappist stands for the ground-based transiting planets and planetesimal small telescope so how does the transit method work a solar eclipse for example is a transit occurring as the moon passes between the sun and earth exoplanet transits occur when a distant exoplanet passes between its star and earth when a total solar eclipse takes place our sun's light goes from one hundred percent to almost zero percent as seen from earth then back to one hundred percent as the eclipse ends but when scientists observe distant stars in search of transiting exoplanets a star's light might and most dim by only a few percent or fractions of a percent still assuming it happens regularly as the planet orbited star that minute dip in a star's light can reveal an otherwise hidden planet so the dip in a star's light is a handy tool for revealing exoplanets to use it astronomers have had to develop very sensitive instruments that can quantify the light emitted by a star that's why although astronomers looked for exoplanets for many years they didn't begin to find them until the 1990s when we began deploying these powerful telescopes in space some planets are found via the wobble method the second most used path to discovering exoplanet is via doppler spectroscopy sometimes called the radial velocity method and commonly known as the wobble method as of april 2016 582 exoplanets were discovered using this method that's about 30 percent of the total known planets at the time in all gravitationally bound systems involving stars the objects in orbit in this case a star and its exoplanet move around a common center of mass when an exoplanet's mass is significant in comparison to its star's mass there is the potential for us to notice a wobble in the center of mass detectable via a shift in the star's light frequencies this shift is essentially a doppler shift it is the same sort of effect that makes the race car's engine sound room in high pitch as the car zooms toward you and low pitch as the car races away likewise when viewed from earth the slight movement of a star and its planet around a common center of gravity affects the star's normal light spectrum if the star is moving towards the observer then its spectrum would appear slightly shifted towards the blue if it is moving away it will be shifted towards the red the difference isn't very big but modern instruments are sensitive enough to measure it so when astronomers measure cyclic changes in the light spectrum of a star they may suspect a significant body that is a large exoplanet is orbiting it other astronomers may then confirm its presence the wobble method is useful only for finding very large exoplanets earth-like planets couldn't be detected in this manner because the wobble caused by earth-like objects is too small to be measured by current instruments also managed to find some planets via direct imaging direct imaging is fancy terminology for taking a picture of the exoplanet it's the third most popular method of discovering exoplanets but it is a very difficult and limiting method first of all the star system has to be relatively close to earth next the exoplanets in that system must be far enough from the stars so that astronomers can distinguish them from the star's glare also scientists must use a special instrument called a coronagraph not at all related to the virus to block the light from the star this reveals the dimmer light of any

 planet or planets that may be orbiting it according to astronomer kate falette the number of exoplanets found via direct imaging varies depending on one's definition of a planet but she did state that anywhere from 10 to 30 have been discovered in this

 way so not a total bust right

 however if a planet is very tiny and absorbs all the light from its host star we need something special to discern these extra dark cosmic objects einstein's general relativity yes science so how do we use general relativity to find these planets objects in space curve space time and so light traveling near them bend as a result this is analogous to optical refraction in some ways if you put a pencil in a cup of water the pencil appears broken because the light is refracted by the water although it wasn't proven until decades later the famous astronomer fritz zwicky said as early as 1937 that the gravity of galaxy clusters should enable them to act as gravitational lenses in contrast to galaxy clusters or even single galaxies stars and their planets are not very massive they don't bend light very much that's why this method is called microlensing to use microlensing for exoplanet discovery one star must pass in front of another more distant star as seen from earth scientists may then be able to measure the light from the distant source being bent by the passing system allowing them to differentiate between the intervening star and its exoplanet this method works even if the exoplanet is very far away from its star which is an advantage over the

 transit and wapple methods but

 as you can imagine it's a difficult method to use only 19 planets have been found using this method all the conventional methods we mentioned in this article have certain pros and cons however few common downsides to these methods are that they are extensively time taking need manual monitoring and the collective data collected by telescopes are plenty to sort through this is why a research team at the university of warwick led by david armstrong has created an algorithm or in simpler terms and artificial intelligence to sort through the copious amounts of observation data researchers use nasa's transiting exoplanet survey satellite or test to study the data put it simply a dip in the brightness indicates

 that something is passing by a star

 it doesn't always have to be a planet but it helps narrow down the search this led to the research team creating a machine learning algorithm that was applied to nasa's kepler mission and was able to differentiate planets from other celestial objects the algorithm was a big breakthrough as the ai was able to confirm as many as 50 planets the ai's efficiency has allowed scientists to focus their resources and time on confirmed planets instead of wasting their time trying to identify new ones with a longer method used till now this will also help them rank planets that can have a similar atmosphere to the earth rather than saying which candidates are more likely to be planets scientists can now say what the precise statistical likelihood is where there is less than a one percent

 chance of a candidate being a false positive it can be considered as a validated planet the algorithm is still in its early phase despite the breakthrough however it will be further used on the ginormous amount of data collected from projects like tess and esa's planned plato mission the warwick research team is still working on the algorithm and once the ai is completed it will be much easier and quicker to find future potential exoplanets and the more discoveries the a.i will find the more it will learn from them and the more powerful it will become who knows maybe one day the ai will find the perfect home for humanity after we leave earth to expand our horizons do you think it's possible and how soon will it happen tell us in the comments and as always

 thanks for reading fact nominal