NASA：谷歌AI发现开普勒恒星系统中的第八颗行星，第二个太阳系？

New discovery pushes star Kepler-90’s menagerie to eight planets

新发现：开普勒90星系中第八颗行星

If you have an emotional attachment to our Solar System’s distinctions, you may want to look away. We’ve found another star system with eight planets, tying our own mark. Oh, and a Google machine-learning algorithm is responsible for the discovery.

如果你对太阳系具有浓厚兴趣，那我们可以告诉你在谷歌机器学习算法的帮助下，科学家发现了另一个具有八大行星的恒星系统

This is one of two new exoplanets scraped from the massive archive of data from the Kepler space telescope by NASA’s Andrew Vanderburg and Christopher Shallue of the Google AI team. Planets detected by Kepler show up as slight dips in the brightness of a star—the result of the planet passing in front and blocking some of the light. Some planets are more obvious than others, and the goal here was to turn the algorithm loose on digging through past measurements for weak signals that had been missed.

这颗行星是被发现的两颗外行星之一，是美国宇航局的Andrew Vanderburg和谷歌人工智能团队的Christopher Shallue收集的大量数据所证实的。开普勒探测到恒星亮度有些许下降，这是由于其他行星在前面经过并挡住了一些光所造成的。

Like all machine learning systems, this one was fed measurements from previously identified exoplanets to work out what differentiates real signals from coincidental blips. The researchers say the system emerged with the ability to correctly identify false positives about 96 percent of the time.

与所有的机器学习系统一样，这一系统是取自先前被确认的外行星测量数据，以区分真正信号与偶然信号。研究人员说，该系统可以正确识别96%误报信息。

It was then fed the data for 670 stars that have had at least one planet identified already in the hopes that more would turn up. A handful did, but after eliminating the ones that could potentially be explained by confounding factors like interactions with companion stars, two candidates passed all the standard screening steps.

人工智能还提供了670颗疑似行星的数据，但是在排除了那些可能被混淆的干扰因素，比如与伴星的相互作用，也仅仅两颗通过了所有的标准筛选程序。

One appears to be a rocky planet only about 30 percent larger than the Earth that becomes the 8th planet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star, designated Kepler-90i, which is 2,545 lightyears away. Sporting a dizzying orbit of just 14.4 days, this planet is close enough to its host star to be at least 435 degrees Celsius (about 800 degrees Fahrenheit)—decidedly “hot porridge” in Goldilocks parlance. In fact, all eight planets in this star system would fit inside Earth’s orbit.

其中一颗似乎是岩石行星，它比地球大30%，被称为“开普勒-90i”，成为了类太阳系恒星系统中的第8颗行星。这颗行星绕着一颗类似太阳的恒星公转，距离地球2545光年。这颗行星绕轨一周仅为14.4天，它离恒星非常近，以至于行星温度达到435摄氏度——毫无疑问，它绝对是一锅“乱炖热粥”。事实上，这个恒星系统中所有的八颗行星都贴合于地球的轨道。