Quick question: what if a computer could play hide-and-seek… with planets? Scientists say a new AI tool called RAVEN searched through NASA TESS telescope data and found more than 100 planets that were hiding in the numbers.
So how does a telescope find a planet that’s super far away? TESS watches stars for tiny dips in brightness. Imagine you’re looking at a porch light, and a little moth floats in front of it—just for a moment, the light looks a teeny bit dimmer. When a planet passes in front of its star, it can cause a small dimming too. That’s called a transit (a planet crossing in front of a star).
But stars are busy! They flicker, they wobble, and space data can be noisy, kind of like trying to hear a whisper in a room full of humming fans. That’s where AI helps: it’s trained to notice patterns that humans might miss, and it can scan huge piles of data faster than a person could. Quick note: AI is a tool that helps scientists—it’s not a person.
The team said RAVEN even helped spot rare and extreme kinds of planets. That matters because every new planet is a clue—like a puzzle piece—about how solar systems form, what planets are made of, and where scientists might look for worlds that are very different from Earth.