Finding life on other planets is one of the most intriguing and exciting aspects of astronomy. Scientists have long aspire to identify planets that may one day be habitable. With that distant goal in mind, a group of Indian researchers, two students and a professor, has found not one but 60 planets, out of a total of 5,000 known, that may be potentially habitable.
To reach this conclusion, the group relied on an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-base method name as Multi-Stage Memetic Binary Tree Anomaly Identifier (MSMBTAI).
The method the researchers use is base on detecting an anomaly via a novel multi-stage memetic algorithm (MSMA).
The algorithm can act as a screening tool to evaluate habitability perspectives from observe properties.
What this means is that the researchers considered Earth as an anomaly, meaning it is the only habitable planet among thousands of planets known so far.
The researchers have explore whether similar “anomaly candidates” like Earth exist in the universe.
Their exploration gave a result in an astounding 60 planets showing similar anomalies.
The result was the same when the method consider the surface temperatures of planets as a feature and without the surface temperatures.
The researchers have also propose that there could be 8,000 planets in total in the universe.
The researchers are from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), a Bengaluru-base autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology.
They were join by an undergraduate student, Kartik Bhatia, from the Goa campus of BITS Pilani and a doctoral candidate, Jyotirmoy Sarkar, from the same college.
Others too contribute to the study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Artificial Intelligence help the researchers scan through thousands of planets as comparing data points manually would have been a tedious job.
The researchers also had the guidance and supervision of Professor Snehanshu Saha of BITS Pilani (Goa Campus) and Dr. Margarita Safonova of Indian Institute of Astrophysics.
