An international team led by astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles (USA) has announced the discovery of hundreds of exoplanet candidates, including 366 that had not been identified before.
The experts, led by researcher Jon Zink describe in their work published in The Astronomical Journal, a new approach to the detection of exoplanets using data collected by the K2 mission of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
The US space agency’s supercomputer , Pleiades, is able to decipher the difference between real exoplanets and “false positives.”
“Unlike other exoplanet detection machine learning programs, ExoMiner is not a black box; there is no mystery as to why you decide something is a planet or not. We can easily explain which characteristics of the data lead ExoMiner to reject or confirm a planet, ”explains Jon Jenkins, exoplanet scientist at NASA Ames Research and co-author of the study.
The algorithm, after analyzing 500 terabytes of data, found 301 single planet candidates and 57 multi-planet systems. Among the never-before-seen candidates is a star system with two gas giant planets orbiting their stars very quickly, as well as a system whose planets are in resonance.
Referencia: Scaling K2. IV. A Uniform Planet Sample for Campaigns 1–8 and 10–18. Jon K. Zink, Kevin K. Hardegree-Ullman, Jessie L. Christiansen, Sakhee Bhure, Britt Duffy Adkins, Erik A. Petigura, Courtney D. Dressing, Ian J. M. Crossfield and Joshua E. Schlieder. The Astronomical Journal (2021). DOI:https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ac2309
