Solar system with eight planets like ours found
A solar system with as many planets as our own has been discovered with the help of Nasa’s Kepler space telescope and artificial intelligence, the US space agency said.
“Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star,” Nasa said.
However, none of the planets are expected to be hospitable to life.
The eight-planet system – the largest known outside of ours – orbits a star called Kepler 90 some 2,545 light-years away.
“The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system,” said Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.
“You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer.”
The newly identified planet, Kepler-90i, is a rocky planet like Earth, but orbits its star once every 14.4 days, meaning a full year there is the same as two weeks on Earth.
“Kepler-90i is not a place I’d like to go visit, though,” said Vanderburg. “Its surface is likely far too hot.” Nasa calculated its average tem
800° perature at about F – as hot as Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.
Scientists found it by using machine learning from Google.
The process involved teaching a computer to scan a trove of 35,000 possible planetary signals collected from Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope for search for signs of planetary transits. — AFP