Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

New Discovery! NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has gazed at more than 150,000 stars and continues to transmit back data that leads to important discoveries of celestial objects in our galaxy, including first-time observations of planets outside our solar system.
Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel

What’s the new scoop of heavenly news from the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope?

NASA is set to announce the latest discovery at 1 p.m. eastern time on Thursday, December 14.

Machine learning

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.

Past its prime directive

When Kepler launched in March 2009, scientists didn’t know how common planets were beyond our solar system. Astronomers now believe there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky.

Kepler completed its prime mission in 2012 and went on to collect data for an additional year in an extended mission.

In 2014, the spacecraft began a new extended mission called K2, which continues the search for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, while introducing new research opportunities to study young stars, supernovae and other cosmic phenomena.