it's very special to know that there's
something out there millions of miles
away that no one knows about except for
you it's kind of like you're given
secrets about the universe but it's my
job to figure out what those secrets
mean I had no idea that machine learning
had been used to find planets before
that I've heard of machine learning to
find cat faces and YouTube videos and
you know make memes but never first like
a scientific pursuit in 2009 NASA
launched Kepler space telescope and its
goal was to find planets and it did this
by staring up at hundreds of thousands
of stars if something passes in front of
one star you're going to get a decrease
in brightness and so if you get that dip
periodically that can be a sign that
there is a planet there one astronomer
can't go through all that data
successfully so Chris and my professor
Andrew Vanderburgh were working on a
project to make a neural network to help
speed up the process but in 2013
Kepler's reaction wheels broke so Kepler
couldn't stay steady anymore
the algorithm that Chris made couldn't
work very well on that new scrambled
data so I was going to modify the sanera
Network so that we can find all the
planets that there are in that data set
I spent you know 40 hours a week working
on my laptop I went from knowing nothing
about machine learning to training my
own model using tensorflow
my code wasn't working exactly right for
whatever reason it wasn't learning at
all I was scared that maybe it was all
broken I didn't find anything
that I'm Andru some targets like do you
think these are real and I got an email
back like pretty quickly that said yes I
think these are great congratulations
you found your first planet
I remember screenshotting it and sending
it to my family group chat like look
guys I and finally like I'm a planet
hunter I found planets like this is the
best feeling I knew nothing at the start
of my project a beginner can slowly but
surely build up their knowledge and
discover things that they never thought
were possible if I can do it I think
everyone else can do it
you