When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration of the TESS exoplanet hunter detecting close-in planets around a distant star. | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)Astronomers have discovered over 100 new worlds beyond the solar system hiding in data collected by NASA’s exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and it’s thanks to artificial intelligence. The technique also identified a further 2,000 or so candidate extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, around half of which were hitherto undetected.Considering that there are around 6,000 exoplanets currently in NASA’s exoplanet catalog, confirming those candidate worlds would represent a major boost in our hunt for planets around other stars. The innovative new AI program behind this discovery is called RAVEN, and was developed by researchers at the University of Warwick in the U.K.AdvertisementAdvertisementTESS spots exoplanets by recording the tiny dips in starlight they cause when they pass in front of the face of the parent star, a passage called a “transit.” RAVEN studied TESS observations of over 2.2 million stars collected during the NASA spacecraft’s first four years, hunting for planets so close to their home stars that they complete an orbit in just 16 Earth days. The AI pipeline could therefore help to confirm how common these tight-orbit planets are and the kind of systems in which they are most often found.”This represents one of the best characterized samples of close-in planets and will help us identify the most promising systems for future study,” team leader Marina Lafarga Magro of the University of Warwick said in a statement.RAVEN’s eagle eye is scanning the Neptunian desertSince the first exoplanets were discovered in the mid-1990s, the exoplanet catalog has burgeoned to over 6,000 confirmed entries, but thousands of candidates identified by exoplanet-hunting space missions like TESS, Kepler and CHEOPS (Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite) remain unconfirmed.That is because scientists need to determine whether small dips in starlight are actually caused by transiting exoplanets or if they have another, non-planetary cause. This means making these confirmations more rapidly and confidently is a major challenge that astronomers are eager to ease.AdvertisementAdvertisement”T …
