(ORDO NEWS) — New research from the University of Georgia shows that AI can be used to search for planets outside the solar system.
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992. At the moment, more than 5,000 such planets are known to exist.
Forming exoplanets are difficult to see because they are very far away, often hundreds of light-years from Earth. The disks in which these planets form are very thick.
Their thickness is greater than the distance from the Earth to the Sun. And the planets, as a rule, are in the middle of these disks.
The study showed that AI can help scientists in their search.
“We used purely synthetic telescope data generated by computer simulations to train this artificial intelligence and then applied it to real telescope data.
This has never been done before in our field, and it paves the way for a flood of discoveries as data comes in from the James Webb Telescope,” said Cassandra Hall, co-author of the study.
Scientists need the next generation of analytical tools to process high-quality data. Researchers can then spend more time on theoretical interpretations rather than trying to find tiny signatures.
“Pretty much the way we analyze this data is that you have dozens, hundreds of images for a particular drive, and you just go through them and ask, ‘Is this a wiggle?’
Then you run a dozen simulations to see if it’s really a wiggle,” said Jason Terry, lead author of the study.
Terry says that machine learning can improve human potential to save time and money.
“In science, and especially in astronomy in general, skepticism about machine learning and artificial intelligence persists.
There is a valid criticism that this is such a black box where you have hundreds of millions of parameters and somehow you get the answer.
But we think that in this work we have demonstrated quite convincingly that machine learning is up to the task.
You can argue about interpretation. But in this case, we have very concrete results that demonstrate the power of this method,” he notes.
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