Find Your Own Exoplanet. (Not kidding!!)

You Can Hunt for Alien Planets in Kepler Data Using Newly Released Google Code

You can try your hand at advanced exoplanet hunting, thanks to some newly released code. In December, a pair of researchers announced that they'd discovered two alien planets in the archival data gathered by NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, using Google machine-learning techniques based on the network of neurons in the human brain.

 From article, (You can try your hand at advanced exoplanet hunting, thanks to some newly released code.

In December, a pair of researchers announced that they'd discovered two alien planets in the archival data gathered by NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, using Google machine-learning techniques based on the network of neurons in the human brain.

Those techniques are now available to the public. [Images: Discovery of 8th Planet in Kepler-90 System with Google AI]

"Today, we're excited to release our code for processing the Kepler data, training our neural network model and making predictions about new candidate signals," Google senior software engineer Chris Shallue, the lead author of that December discovery study, wrote in a blog post Thursday (March 8).

"We hope this release will prove a useful starting point for developing similar models for other NASA missions, like K2 (Kepler's second mission) and the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission," Shallue added.

You can find the code, as well as instructions about how to use it, on GitHub.

"It's possible that some potentially habitable planets like Earth, which are relatively small and orbit around relatively dim stars, might be hiding just below the traditional detection threshold — there might be hidden gems still undiscovered in the Kepler data!" Shallue wrote in the blog post.

And there has been a lot of opportunity for planets to slip between the cracks. Shallue and Vanderburg spotted the two newly discovered exoplanets after analyzing Kepler observations of just 670 stars. The spacecraft studied about 150,000 stars during its primary mission, from 2009 through 2013, and has looked at thousands more during the K2 phase. (The primary mission ended when the second of Kepler's orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed. K2 involves planet hunting on a more limited basis, as well as observations of a variety of cosmic objects and phenomena.)

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