Nasa announcement live: Latest updates as space agency reveals solar system discovered with artificial intelligence
There have been few clues about what's going on
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Your support makes all the difference.Nasa is preparing for a major announcement after its planet-hunting telescope found something in space.
Details on the revelation are sparse. But the agency only holds such events for significant breakthroughs, leading to speculation about what the Kepler space telescope might have found.
All Nasa has said is that it will hold an event at 1pm eastern time, or 6pm in the UK. It will be livestreamed on its website, and all the latest news will be shared here.
The announcement gave some sparse details about what to expect. The discovery has been made using Google's artificial intelligence technology, it said, and it will almost certainly offer news about an exoplanet.
Those suggestions offer some clues about what is going to be announced, but otherwise everything will be revealed when the event begins.
Please allow a moment for the liveblog to load.
Question: If artificial intelligence comes on the rise, will it spoil the job of citizen scientists, like the various groups that pick through the data and identify parts that are strange?Answer: Neural networks are good at recognising patterns. But they're not very good at seeing new things that it hasn't seen before, something that humans are much better at.
How do we find out whether there's life on these planets? We don't, from the Kepler data – but we're doing some exciting work, like the James Webb Telescope, that will be able to scan with a bit more detail and learn more about the planets themselves.
The researchers making the pioneering work clear: this is the first time a neural network has found an exoplanet, and it's the first time that one has been turned on the weaker signals that are too uncertain to be investigated by humans.
The researchers are challenged to define a neural network in as simple a way aspossible. "A neural network is a machine learning algorithm that is very loosely inspired by the human brain and it has a variety of use but let's focus on the fact that it can be used to classify inputs. In this case, we already talked about the question of classifying images of cats and dogs or trucks and cars, or in this case clasifying signals from the Kepler telescope as being planets or not planets. It's a type of alogithrn that can classify inputs. it learns by example."
And that brings the press conference to a close! With it, this liveblog will mostly close too, though stay tuned for updates and follow-ups!
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