The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced Thursday the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, which is a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth.
The planet, which has been called Kepler-90i, was discovered in data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
The new planet was found using Google’s machine learning technology, an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers learn.
In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.
Nonetheless, NASA says other planetary systems probably hold more promise for life than Kepler-90 does.
In that sense, NASA details that Kepler-90i is so close to its star that its average surface temperature is believed to exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit.