60 new 'hot Jupiter' candidates spotted
ABP NewsWashington D.C., Jul 7 : A team of researchers has identified a cosmic barbecue, where 60 potential new "hot Jupiters" are glowing like coals on a grill while orbiting only 1% of Sun-like stars. They used a supervised machine learning algorithm, a sophisticated program that can be trained to recognize patterns in data and make predictions, to detect the tiny amplitude variations in observed light that result as an orbiting planet reflects rays of light from its host star. Millholland and Laughlin searched systematically for reflected light signals in the observations of more than 140,000 stars from four years of data from NASA's Kepler mission. Reflected light signals can be difficult to distinguish from stellar or instrumental variability, the researchers said, but a big data approach enabled them to pull out the faint signals.
Discover Related