The universe is incredibly large and constantly expanding, so finding even the largest of planets in the depths of outer space is like hunting down a firefly scurrying across a massive searchlight from miles away. In the past, this process has taken entire teams of scientists multiple years to complete.. Recently, however, there was an immense breakthrough in detecting exoplanets. Interestingly, this isn’t because we built a bigger telescope, but because we finally have better AI to do the looking for us.
The actual challenge in finding planets outside of our Solar System is a “needle-in-a-haystack” type problem. NASA’s TESS space telescope simultaneously tracks the light from millions of stars to detect dimming. The slight dimming that occurs every time another celestial body passes in front of the star is called a “transit.” This indicates that a planet is there. The trick lies in the fact that space is incredibly noisy; star spots and flickerings might cause false signals mimicking a planet. In previous times, astronomers had to sift through hundreds of these light curves to weed out the fakes. With over two million stars to observe, it was a task that would have taken several lifetimes to finish.
And this is where the breakthrough took place. Just this month, researchers at the University of Warwick announced the launch of a new AI-based planetary hunter called RAVEN. RAVEN was trained on simulations and taught how to recognize the exact flash of a real planet. Meanwhile, while scientists could only speculate on dozens of options, RAVEN easily analyzed years of observations to identify over 118 new planets along with thousands of others. In the meantime, NASA’s ExoMiner++ project has been analyzing noisy signals from space to find over 7,000 potential planets
This is significant because artificial intelligence is discovering unusual objects that humans simply haven’t thought about looking for yet. For example, we’ve found planets that circle their stars in under 24 hours, so a year there equals one school day. Another surprising discovery has been planets in the “Neptunian Desert” zone, where they shouldn’t even exist.
We just recently passed the milestone of 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, and that number seems poised to explode very soon. The ultimate question for scientists is not really whether there are more planets;but rather:“Which among the myriad of worlds could support life?” While we are no longer bound by the number of astronomers we can employ, we are limited only by the amount of data our artificial intelligence can interpret. Our next quest would be the discovery of a planet, followed by artificial intelligence sniffing out its atmosphere for oxygen and water.
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