New artificial Intelligence-based tools can help finding habitable planets

What is the News?

Using Artificial Intelligence, Indian Astronomers have devised a new method to identify potentially habitable planets with a high probability.

What is the method adopted by Indian Astronomers to identify potentially habitable planets?

The method is named as Anomaly Detection Method.

This method is based on the postulate that Earth is an anomaly with the possibility of the existence of a few other anomalies among thousands of data points.

Note: Earth being the only habitable planet among thousands of planets is defined as an anomaly. This method explored whether similar ‘anomaly’ candidates can be found.

What are the key findings using this method?

Based on this method, astronomers have found that there are 60 potentially habitable planets out of about 5000 confirmed and nearly 8000 candidate planets proposed. The assessment is based on their close similarity to Earth. 

These planets can be viewed as candidates for anomalous instances in a huge pool of `non-habitable’ exoplanets.

Source: This post is based on the article “New artificial Intelligence-based tools can help finding habitable planets” published in PIB on 11th Feb 2022.