AI may come handy in finding exoplanets, says study

Pointing our eyes (and lenses) at the skies is nothing new. We have been doing that for centuries. What started as an attempt to understand our Solar System has now widened its scope to lead to peering unimaginably deep into the endless expanse. Galaxies, stars and planets are very much within our grasp thanks to modern technology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can write next chapters of our sky-scanning endeavors.

Finding exoplanets is often a tough task. Exoplanets, planets outside are solar system, do not emit their own light. And if a young planet hundreds of lightyears away is obscured by space dust, it's really tough to pinpoint it.

Now, a study carried out by researchers in University of Georgia reveals that Artificial Intelligence can be used to find exoplanets.

"One of the novel things about this is analyzing environments where planets are still forming. Machine learning has rarely been applied to the type of data we’re using before, specifically for looking at systems that are still actively forming planets," said Jason Terry who is a doctoral student in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of physics and astronomy and lead author on the study. Terry was quoted by DevDiscourse.

Main challenge in front of the scientists is giant datasets that need sifting.

"To a large extent the way we analyze this data is you have dozens, hundreds of images for a specific disc and you just look through and ask ‘is that a wiggle?’ then run a dozen simulations to see if that’s a wiggle and … it’s easy to overlook them – they’re really tiny, and it depends on the cleaning, and so this method is one, really fast, and two, its accuracy gets planets that humans would miss," Terry explained.

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