Using AI, Nasa discovers another solar system like ours; has 8 planets

A solar system with as many planets as our own has been discovered with the help of NASA's Kepler space telescope and artificial intelligence, the US space agency said.

"Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star," NASA said in a statement yesterday.

However, none of the planets are expected to be hospitable to life.

The eight-planet system -- the largest known outside of ours -- orbits a star called Kepler 90 some 2,545 light-years away.

"The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system," said Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.

"You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer."

The newly identified planet, Kepler-90i, is a rocky planet like Earth, but orbits its star once every 14.4 days, meaning a full year there is the same as two weeks on Earth.

"Kepler-90i is not a place I'd like to go visit, though," said Vanderburg.

"Its surface is likely far too hot."

NASA calculated its average temperature at about 426 degree Celsius -- as hot as Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.

Scientists found it by using machine learning from Google.
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Scientists detect six comets outside solar system using transit photometry

Scientists have detected the dusty tails of six exocomets -- comets outside our solar system -- orbiting a faint star 800 light years from Earth.

These cosmic balls of ice and dust, which travelled about 160,934 kms per hour before they ultimately vapourised, are some of the smallest objects yet found outside our own solar system, according to a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"It's pretty impressive to be able to see something so small, so far away," said Saul Rappaport, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The discovery marks the first time that an object as small as a comet has been detected using transit photometry, a technique by which astronomers observe a star's light for telltale dips in intensity.

Such dips signal potential transits, or crossings of planets or other objects in front of a star, which momentarily block a small fraction of its light.

In the case of this new detection, the researchers were able to pick out the comet's tail, or trail of gas and dust, which blocked about one-tenth of 1 per cent of the star's light as the comet streaked by.

"It's amazing that something several orders of magnitude smaller than the Earth can be detected just by the fact that it's emitting a lot of debris," Rappaport said.

The detection was made using data from Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope, a stellar observatory that was launched into space in 2009.
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures tiny Martian moon Phobos

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has beamed back images of the tiny Martian moon Phobos in its orbital trek around the red planet.

Over the course of 22 minutes, Hubble took 13 separate images, allowing astronomers to create a time-lapse video showing the diminutive moon's orbital path.

The Hubble observations were intended to photograph Mars, and the moon's cameo appearance was a bonus, scientists said.

A football-shaped object just 26x21x17 kilometres, Phobos is one of the smallest moons in the solar system.

The moon completes an orbit in just seven hours and 39 minutes, which is faster than Mars rotates.

Rising in the Martian west, it runs three laps around the Red Planet in the course of one Martian day, which is about 24 hours and 40 minutes.

It is the only natural satellite in the solar system that circles its planet in a time shorter than the parent planet's day.

About two weeks after the Apollo 11 manned lunar landing on July 20, 1969, NASA's Mariner 7 flew by the Red Planet and took the first crude close-up snapshot of Phobos.
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