NASA has found a distant star circled by eight planets, equal to the complement in our own Solar System.
It’s the largest number of worlds ever discovered in a planetary system outside our own.
The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google.
“Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington.
“This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come.”
“This makes Kepler-90 the first star to host as many planets as our own Solar System,” said Christopher Shallue, a software engineer at Google, which contributed to the discovery.
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/S_HRh0ZynjE” frameborder=”0″ gesture=”media” allow=”encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
