Solar system with eight planets like ours found

An 8th planet has been found in a faraway solar system, matching our own in numbers. Even more amazingly, machines and not humans made the discovery.

NASA joined with Google on Thursday to announce the finding.

This 8th planet orbits the star known as Kepler-90, some 2,545 light-years away.

Like Earth, this new planet, Kepler-90i, is the 3rd rock from its sun. But it’s much closer to its sun, orbiting in just 14 days, and therefore a scorching 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 Celsius) at the surface. In fact, all eight planets are bunched around this star, orbiting closer than Earth does to our sun.

This is the only 8-planet solar system found like ours, so far, tying for the most planets observed around a single star. Our solar system had nine planets until Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, a decision that still stands.

Google used data collected by NASA’s planet hunter, the Kepler Space Telescope, to develop its machine-learning computer program. It focuses on weak planetary signals, so feeble and numerous it would take humans considerable time to examine.

While machine learning has been used before in the search for planets beyond our solar system, it's believed to be the first time an artificial neural network such as this has been used to find a new world.

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