NASA exoplanet announcement: Has the space agency finally discovered ALIEN life?
The video will start in 8 Cancel
Get daily updates directly to your inbox + Subscribe Thank you for subscribing! Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
NASA is set to hold a special announcement on Thursday evening to discuss the latest findings of its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.
The space agency hasn't let anything slip about what it's going to reveal - only that it has been working with Google to survey alien worlds.
"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," it said in a brief press statement .
(Image: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel)
Kepler has made many discoveries, including one in the summer of 10 Earth-like planets that could support alien life .
The space telescope has spent years combing the galaxies looking for evidence of extra-terrestrial life.
It hunts for planets by detecting the minuscule drop in a star's brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.
So far, its has identified 4,034 planet candidates, 2,335 of which have been verified as exoplanets. Of those, 30 are similar in size to Earth and orbiting in their star's habitable zone.
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
When Kepler launched in March 2009, scientists didn’t know how common planets were beyond our solar system. Thanks to Kepler’s treasure trove of discoveries, astronomers now believe there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky.
The hosts of Thursday's announcement will be a panel of experts including:
Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington
Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in Mountain View, California
Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin
Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley
As usual, there will be a question-and-answer session following the main announcement.
Members of the public will be able to submit questions through Twitter by using the hashtag #askNASA.