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The catalog and planet detection algorithm that Jon and the Scaling K2 team devised is a major breakthrough in understanding the population of planets. K2 was an extended mission phase designed to compensate for a mechanical malfunction on the telescope during the primary mission. The project uses data from the K2 phase of the Kepler mission. Petigura and lead author Jon Zink are part of an international team of astronomers called the Scaling K2 project. Image via Tiago Campante/ Peter Devine/ NASA/ UCLA. The study at UCLA discovered 366 new Kepler exoplanets, as well as reconfirming many previous ones, such as Kepler-444 (artist’s concept). Co-author Erik Petigura at UCLA said:ĭiscovering hundreds of new exoplanets is a significant accomplishment by itself, but what sets this work apart is how it will illuminate features of the exoplanet population as a whole. In contrast to the NASA team, they used their own new algorithm designed in-house. Transiting exoplanet candidates in K2 dataīut wait, there’s more! The next day, astronomers at UCLA announced their own finding of 366 new exoplanet candidates in the Kepler data. These 301 discoveries help us better understand planets and solar systems beyond our own, and what makes ours so unique. Hamed Valizadegan is the ExoMiner project lead and machine learning manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center. ExoMiner is highly accurate and in some ways more reliable than both existing machine classifiers and the human experts it’s meant to emulate because of the biases that come with human labeling. When ExoMiner says something is a planet, you can be sure it’s a planet. Hamed Valizadegan, ExoMiner project lead and machine learning manager with the Universities Space Research Association at Ames, said: Now, ExoMiner has confirmed them as actual planets.
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Before this, scientists had already known of them from the Kepler Science Operations Center pipeline, but they were still just candidates. We can easily explain which features in the data lead ExoMiner to reject or confirm a planet.ĮxoMiner found the new exoplanets by analyzing the data from the remaining Kepler dataset of possible planets in the Kepler Data Archive. There is no mystery as to why it decides something is a planet or not.
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Unlike other exoplanet-detecting machine learning programs, ExoMiner isn’t a black box. Jon Jenkins, an exoplanet scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, stated: That task can be very time-consuming, and that’s where ExoMiner comes in. It supplements the human scientists who also go through the data. That is to say, it uses previous positive and false detections to learn how to better tell the difference between the two.ĮxoMiner doesn’t work alone, however. Scientists designed it to better distinguish between real planets and false positives. ExoMiner is a deep neural network that leverages NASA’s supercomputer called Pleiades. ExoMiner uncovers new exoplanetsįirst, ExoMiner. Image via Goddard Space Flight Center/ JPL-Caltech. When a planet passes in front of its star, from our vantage point it causes a small dip in the star’s brightness that scientists can measure to obtain more data. Kepler uses the transit method to detect exoplanets. Meanwhile, astronomers at UCLA found 366 new planetary candidates using their own new algorithm. The NASA research team used a machine learning process called ExoMiner to find 301 new validated planets. No such planets exist in our own solar system. Some orbit their stars much closer than Mercury does our sun, and others are sub-Neptunes, midway in size between Earth and Neptune. Those exoworlds – orbiting distant stars – range from Earth-sized and super-Earth-sized to ones larger than Jupiter. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kepler single-handedly discovered most of the exoplanets we know about today. As of December 6, 2021, astronomers recognize 4,888 confirmed exoplanets. Overall, the Kepler mission was immensely successful. Going fast! Kepler data yields hundreds of new exoplanets It is also available as a preprint on arXiv.ĮarthSky 2022 lunar calendars now available! They make great gifts. A team of scientists from UCLA submitted the second peer-reviewed paper, which The Astronomical Journal published on November 23, 2021. NASA scientists submitted the first of two peer-reviewed papers to the Astrophysical Journal on November 17, 2021. But astronomers are still mining the mission’s data, making new discoveries of distant worlds. It ran out of fuel and was retired in late 2018. Kepler launched and began operations in 2009. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunter – a space observatory – gathered the data. The number of known exoplanets made a big jump up in November 2021, when astronomers announced a whopping 301 newly confirmed planets and an additional 366 new planet candidates. The results come from two new separate studies. Scientists discovered hundreds of new exoplanets in data from the Kepler space telescope.