Cosmic! A solar system that is exactly like our own

FOR the first time in history, scientists have discovered a solar system with just as many planets as our own.

Nasa researchers found two new planets in the Kepler-90 system, bringing it to eight planets just like Earth’s solar system.

The family of exo-planets, meaning planets outside our solar system, orbit the Kepler-90 star, which looks similar to our sun but is 2,545 light-years from Earth.

The discovery was made possible with help from Google’s advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine learning system, which uses algorithms to tell computers how to analyse data sent from Nasa’s telescope.

In a news conference yesterday which focused on the discovery of the Kepler-90i planet, pictured, the researchers revealed this was the first time scientists have confirmed stars can have ‘large families of planets just like our solar system’.

Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI, said: ‘After showing our model 15,000 signals, the neural network learned how to distinguish patterns from actual planets from patterns that are caused by other objects.

‘We used our model to identify two new planets from a set of over 600 stars.

‘One of these two planets is called Kepler 80g.’

‘The planet we are focusing on today is called Kepler 90i, which is the eighth planet in its star system.’

He added: ‘For the first time we know for sure our solar system is not the sole record holder for the number of planets.’

It may be an exciting discovery, but Kepler-90i is ‘not a place you’d like to visit,’ said Nasa astronomer Andrew Vanderburg.

Temperatures on the rocky planet’s surface are ‘scorching’, he said, adding that the average temperature was around 427C (800F).