Artificial Intelligence predicts which planetary systems will survive

WASHINGTON DC: Rejecting the large range of unstable possibilities, all the configurations that would lead to collisions would leave behind a sharper view of planetary systems around other stars, but it's not as easy as it sounds. "Separating the stable from the unstable configurations turns out to be a fascinating and brutally hard problem," said Daniel Tamayo, a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program Sagan Fellow in astrophysical sciences at Princeton. To make sure a planetary system is stable, astronomers need to calculate the motions of multiple interacting planets over billions of years and check each possible configuration for stability -- a computationally prohibitive...