RAS: Droids Beat Astronomers in Predicting Survivability of Exoplanets

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RAS: Droids Beat Astronomers in Predicting Survivability of Exoplanets

Post by bystander » Mon Apr 23, 2018 6:23 pm

Droids Beat Astronomers in Predicting Survivability of Exoplanets
Royal Astronomical Society | 2018 Apr 23
Artificial intelligence is giving scientists new hope for studying the habitability of planets, in a study from astronomers Chris Lam and David Kipping. Their work looks at so-called ‘Tatooines,’ and uses machine learning techniques to calculate how likely such planets are to survive into stable orbits. ...

Circumbinary planets are those planets that orbit two stars instead of just one, much like the fictional planet Tatooine in the Star Wars franchise. Tens of these planets have so far been discovered, but working out whether they may be habitable or not can be difficult.

Moving around two stars instead of just one can lead to large changes in a planet’s orbit, which mean that it is often either ejected from the system entirely, or it crashes violently into one of its twin stars. Traditional approaches to calculating which of these occurs for a given planet get significantly more complicated as soon as the extra star is thrown into the mix. ...

After creating ten million hypothetical Tatooines with different orbits, and simulating each one to test for stability, this huge training set was fed into the deep learning network. Within just a few hours, the network was able to out-perform the accuracy of the standard approach. ...

A Machine Learns to Predict the Stability of Circumbinary Planets - Christopher Lam, David Kipping
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