I trained a neural network to find exoplanets. Here's what actually worked.

I trained a neural network to find exoplanets. Here's what actually worked.

I have recently entered 12th grade, and I've been obsessed with exoplanets for a while now. Not in a casual way — I mean the kind of obsession where you start wondering if you could just... build something that finds them. So I did. What even is an exoplanet classifier? When a planet passes in front of a star, it blocks a tiny fraction of the star's light. Kepler spent 4 years staring at 150,000 stars looking for exactly that — those tiny dips. …