An eighth planet has been discovered orbiting a star 2,545 light-years from Earth, NASA announced Thursday.
The star, called Kepler-90, is located in the Draco constellation. It is the first known star to have as many planets orbiting it as our solar system does, NASA said.
NASA scientists had known about seven planets orbiting Kepler-90. The eighth planet -- dubbed Kepler-90i -- is a hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days, NASA said. By contrast, in our solar system, Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has an orbit of 88 days.
Kepler-90i was found using machine learning from Google Artificial Intelligence. In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, NASA said.
Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in California, told CNN that, "Machine learning really shines in situations where there is so much data that humans can't search it for themselves."
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