AI Is Coming For Exoplanet Detection

Another day, another story about how artificial intelligence is taking over the world. This time, a machine-learning program has successfully located an extrasolar planet (great, AI's not even satisfied with our world) within a protoplanetary disk around a young star. The program had been tested on solar systems that we already knew had planets, but when it was applied to a set of older images it hadn't analyzed yet, the AI identified a planet in a system that had previously been overlooked. We missed the exoplanet, the AI didn't. And, according to the researchers, the AI only took an hour to find the exoplanet, which is a lot faster than what humans can manage. Once the technology is scaled up and tested a bit more, it could go through a lot of data extremely quickly. Who knows how many exoplanets we've missed that it could find? There really will be nowhere for humanity to hide when the robot revolution comes.

Here's Your Chance to Find Your Own Exoplanets!

Well, sort of.

Basically, what you can do is use a code a couple of researchers cooked up to search through archival data from Kepler. They've already found one exoplanet using this code, and now they've released it to the public. So if you want to do your part in the search for exoplanets, here's your opportunity. The link to the code and the instructions are here. Have fun!

Exoplanet Mapping

It's not the easiest task in the world, and the result is less than spectacular, but Hubble has taken the best weather map of an exoplanet to date.  The planet is WASP-43B, a hot Jupiter with twice Jupiter's mass that takes only 19 hours to orbit its star.  In the sun, temperatures reach 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the night half is only a third of that, at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  That's almost cold right there.

Hubble was also able to find water vapor in the planet's atmosphere, which doesn't do the planet much good, seeing as it's hot enough to melt quite a lot of metals, let alone water, but it does mean that we can detect water vapor in the atmospheres of exoplanets, which will come in handy whenever we start peering at smaller, cooler worlds.  You know, ones that might have life.

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A Little Blue Dot

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/11/world/space-blue-planet/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

 I'm a big follower of the search for exoplanets, so I just found this fascinating.  The article is about a planet that the Hubble Space Telescope was able to image 63 light years away.  Hubble didn't image the planet directly, but rather was able to discern the planet's color using the spectrum of light reflected off the planet surface as it orbited the star.  As the planet went behind the star, there was a noticeable drop in the blue portion of the spectrum, indicated the planet is blue in color.  That doesn't mean the planet is covered in water.  No, the planet is what is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant that orbits very close to its star, and is several thousand degrees Fahrenheit.  This particular planet orbits about 3 million miles away from its star, a tenth of the distance between Mercury and our sun.  Scientists guess the planet is about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and that any rain would be liquid glass.  Now, this is obviously not a nice place, but the fact that we can do this is remarkable science.  The precision of the Hubble is remarkable, despite its age.  The news about exoplanets has been getting steadily more exciting as time goes on, I look forward to hearing the next story on them.