Indian Astronomers to identify potentially habitable planets

Is there a habitable planet like the Earth anywhere in the Galaxy? That’s a quite interesting question which everyone would love to read and know about. Indian Astronomers are going to look for such a planet where habitation conditions such as atmosphere, water, air exists. These Indian Astronomers have used an Artificial Intelligence-based algorithm to identify such planets.

Ministry of Science & Technology has said in a press statement that astronomers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology, Govt. Of India, along with astronomers from BITS Pilani, Goa campus have devised a new approach -- an anomaly detection method -- by which they can identify potentially habitable ones with a high probability.

“The method is based on the postulate that Earth is an anomaly, with the possibility of existence of few other anomalies among thousands of data points. The study is published in the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS),” the Ministry said.

It added, “According to the study, 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.”

Dr. Snehanshu Saha of BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus and Dr. Margarita Safonova of Indian Institute of Astrophysics, talking about the research work of the project, said, “Earth being the only habitable planet among thousands of planets is defined as an anomaly. We explored whether similar ‘anomaly candidates can be found using novel anomaly detection methods.”