Scientists at the University of Warwick have used a new robot mind to find 118 new planets. This system is called the RAVEN pipeline. It looked through a mountain of data from NASA’s TESS mission.
The robot looked at more than 2.2 million stars.
It found small dips in the light.
These dips happen when a planet moves in front of its star. It finds the signal, checks it, and proves the planet is real. Among these 118 newly confirmed discoveries, the pipeline identified worlds that challenge our understanding of planetary evolution.
Some of these new worlds are very strange.
They are called ultra-short-period planets.
They fly around their suns in less than 24 hours.
On these worlds, your birthday would happen every single day. Others live in the Neptunian desert.
This is a place where big, gassy planets usually boil away because they are too close to the heat. But RAVEN found them anyway.
They defy what we thought we knew about how planets survive.
Finding these outliers requires a level of consistency that previous methods lacked.
The RAVEN tool is better than the tools we had before.
Older tools only did one part of the work. Humans had to help them. Humans get tired.
They miss things.
They see ghosts in the data. RAVEN found 1,000 new candidates that no one had ever seen. Because the machine is so steady, the results are clean.
We can use this list to map the stars like a real map. This move toward total automation has sparked a debate over the role of human intuition in astronomy.
The Fight Between Logic and Light
Some people say we should not trust a machine to find our future homes.They argue that a computer does not understand the soul of a star. This is a silly argument.
The machine sees the truth because it has no feelings.
It does not want to find a planet, so it only finds the ones that are actually there.
There is a secret war between the old way of looking at stars and this new, cold logic.
The old way is slow. While the debate continues, the raw output of this logical approach provides a comprehensive catalog of our local neighborhood.
The Scoreboard of our Local Universe
We now have a perfect sample of planets that live close to their suns. This list tells us exactly how common these hot worlds are. It shows us which stars to point our big telescopes at next. This is the most accurate count we have ever made. The RAVEN pipeline turned a mess of light into a list of places.This catalog serves as the foundation for immediate follow-up efforts already underway.
The Path Toward Counting New Worlds
TESS went into space in 2018 to hunt for these shadows.Since then, it has sent back millions of pictures.
The University of Warwick team spent years building the RAVEN code to handle this flood.
In the last week, since May 2, 2026, the team started using RAVEN on data from the SPECULOOS project in the south.
This helps confirm the weight of the planets.
They are also looking at stars called M-dwarfs.
These are small, red stars that live a long time. By May 10, 2026, the James Webb Space Telescope has already been told to look at three of the RAVEN planets.
We want to see if they have air or water.
Beyond atmospheric studies, the data is also revealing complex gravitational structures.
The Hidden Music of Orbiting Pairs
RAVEN found systems where two planets live very close to each other.They dance around the same star in a tight space.
These pairs are a surprise.
They should crash into each other, but they stay in their lanes.
The machine found these by looking for two different rhythms in the light.
It is like hearing two different songs played on one guitar.
This means there are many more "crowded" houses in space than we ever guessed.
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