 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 catfaces 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 Vanderberg 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 this neural 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 and I didn't find anything Then I sent Andrew 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 Remember screen-shotting it and sending it to my family group chat like look guys I am 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