JAKARTA – Scientists believe that the Milky Way Galaxy is home to billions of planets. In the endless quest to unravel it all, more than 300 new discoveries have just been added to NASA’s official list.
This Solar System has a diameter of about 287.46 billion kilometers and is home to eight planets (including Earth). That sounds like a lot, but our Solar System is a minuscule dot compared to the entire universe – and even compared to the Milky Way.
It is estimated that the Milky Way (our home galaxy) is home to 100 thousand million stars and at least 100 billion planets. From there, the Milky Way is just one galaxy in a sea of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe. This kind of scale is extremely difficult to grasp, but it is something scientists and astronomers are constantly trying to develop a better understanding of.
That’s what makes this latest announcement from NASA so exciting. To date, NASA has discovered 4,569 planets outside our Solar System but within the Milky Way (also known as ‘exoplanets’).
On November 22, NASA confirmed that it had just added 301 new exoplanets to the list at once. This is an achievement that sounds impossible, but it works thanks to advanced neural network technology straight out of science fiction.
Scientists have developed several methods for finding exoplanets, one of which revolves around studying stars. If the star dims slightly when observed, it is likely because there is a planet orbiting it. It’s a proven method for determining potential planetary sizes and orbits, but the number of possible stars studied is too large for humans to handle alone. That’s where NASA’s ‘ExoMiner’ program comes into play.
ExoMiner is a deep neural network created by NASA to look at potential exoplanet data and determine whether it is a real or false positive. ExoMiner is trained using proven discovery methods and “properties that human experts use to confirm new exoplanets.”
It takes this information, gets smarter by reviewing previously confirmed exoplanets, and uses all that information to identify new exoplanets at a speed no human can match.
Using ExoMiner alongside people who are “professionals in combing data and parsing what exists and not planets,” NASA was able to produce 300+ discoveries as if it were nothing.
All 301 exoplanets confirmed by ExoMiner were first discovered by Keppler and its K2 follow-up mission. All planets were promoted to ‘candidate status’, but until ExoMiner appeared, NASA had no resources to confirm whether or not they were indeed planets.
This is interesting for several reasons. In the case of this latest discovery, ensuring 301 new planets in one fell swoop is a major achievement. This may be a small dent in revealing the billions of planets believed to exist in our galaxy, but it’s a bigger step forward than NASA has ever taken before.
It’s also what makes ExoMiner’s future so thrilling. With these 301 planets confirmed, NASA can train ExoMiner to work on other discovery missions. After finding planets with Kepler data, the next plan is to train ExoMiner to work with TESS (The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and confirmed the potential exoplanets it found.
With each new planet giving scientists a better understanding of the galaxy we live in, the possibilities for ExoMiner are quite surprising.
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