Alien BREAKTHROUGH? NASA to hold press conference to reveal latest discovery THIS WEEK
NASA could be on the verge of an alien breakthrough after calling a press conference to unveil a major new discovery.
The space agency will hold a press conference on Thursday to reveal its latest major discovery after searching outside of our solar system for life by scanning habitable planets.
The new discovery comes from the team at the Kepler space telescope, who have been searching for extraterrestrial life since 2009.
The telescope searches for Earth-sized planets in the “habitable zones” of nearby stars and has subsequently found thousands of planets which could hold life.
NASA officials said: "The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google.
"Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data."
The Kepler space telescope spots alien worlds by noticing the tiny brightness dips they cause when they cross the face of their host star from the spacecraft's perspective.
Kepler has become the most successful planet hunter in history.
The telescope has found 2,500 alien worlds, which is around 70 per cent of all known exoplanets.
The vast majority of these discoveries have come from observations that Kepler made during its original mission, which ran from 2009 to 2013.
Over the past few years, researchers have used improved analysis techniques to spot many exoplanets in data that Kepler gathered half-a-decade ago.
Kepler’s first mission, which ended in May 2013, involved observing around 150,000 stars.
The mission ended when the spacecraft lost its second orientation-maintaining "reaction wheel," which allows it to be directed towards stars.
Kepler is now on its second mission, called K2, where it is in search for exoplanets on a more limited basis.
Last year, NASA announced the discovery of nine planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1.
Three of the planets were believed to be in the star’s habitable zone and capable of harbouring life.
A spokesman for NASA said: "The latest Kepler catalogue of planet candidates was created using the most sophisticated analyses yet, yielding the most complete and reliable accounting of distant worlds to date.
"This survey will enable new lines of research in exoplanet study, which looks at planets outside our solar system.”
Nasa is holding a major press conference after its planet-hunting telescope made a new breakthrough.
The Kepler space telescope is operated by Nasa to discover other earths, some of which could support life. And its latest discovery is significant enough to bring with it a huge press conference.
Very little further information was given about the announcement, which will take place on Thursday. But it will almost certainly relate to exoplanets – Earth-sized worlds that orbit around their own stars, and are our best hope of finding alien life.
The space agency said that the discovery was made with the help of Google artificial intelligence, which is being used to analyse the data sent down by the telescope. By using machine learning provided by the tech giant, Nasa hopes that it can pick through the possible planets more quickly and hopefully find life-supporting planets sooner.
Nasa said that four engineers and scientists would take part in the session. They include Paul Hertz, who leads Nasa’s astrophysics division, a senior Google software engineer, and two scientists.
The Kepler telescope was launched in 2009, when scientists didn’t know how many exoplanets there were. It has shown they are surprisingly common, indicating that each star might have its own planet.
It completed its main mission in 2012, but has continued to do more work. In 2014, it began a major mission called K2, which looks for more exoplanets as well as studying other cosmic phenomena.
The sheer amount of data coming from the telescope means that scientists have trouble picking through it to find the planets that might be interesting. The introduction of the use of artificial intelligence is intended to help with that, by allowing computers to do some of the work.
The Kepler mission has already led to major breakthroughs, finding that the universe is full of planets that could theoretically support life. Many of those breakthroughs are announced in major press conferences.
In February, for instance, it said that it was holding a major press announcement similar to the one this week. At that event, it said that it had found the “holy grail” – an entire solar system that could support life.
