The American space agency NASA and the technology company Googlehave identified an eighth planet in a faraway solar system.That solar system now has exactly the same number of planets as our own.Machines made the surprising discovery, not human researchers.NASA and Google representatives made a joint announcementabout the discovery on December 14.The newly discovered planet orbits the star known as Kepler-90.The system is about 2,545 light-years away.A light-year is about 9.5 trillion kilometers.Researchers have named the planet Kepler-90i.Like Earth, Kepler-90i is the third farthest planet from its sun.However, Kepler-90i is much closer to its sun.It only takes the planet 14 days to orbit Kepler-90.So, its surface is much warmer -- 427 degrees Celsius.In fact, all the planets in the Kepler-90 solar system orbitcloser to their sun than Earth does to our sun.So far, this is the only other eight-planet solar systemthat researchers have found.Eight is the largest number of planets ever observed around a single sun.Our solar system had nine planets up until 2006,when the International Astronomical Union decided Plutodid not meet the requirements to be considered a planet.Instead, the group renamed it a dwarf planet.But some astronomers believe there could bea large ninth planet far off in our solar system.They call it Planet X, and believe it is the size of Neptune.Researchers also believe there could be nineor more planets in the Kepler-90 solar system.Google used data from NASA's special planet-hunting device,called the Kepler Space Telescope, to locate Kepler-90i.The company used the data to develop a computer programwith machine learning.This means it can learn and improve itselfwithout a programmer telling it to do so.The program carefully studies planetary signalsthat are so weak it would take humans years to examine them.Christopher Shallue is a senior software engineerat Google in Mountain View, California.He said, "This is a really exciting discovery,and we consider it to be a successful proof of conceptto be using neural networks to identify planets,even in ... situations where the signals are very weak."NASA astrophysicist and Kepler project scientist Jessie Dotsonsaid she is "so excited to see where this goes next."Shallue partnered with astronomer Andrew Vanderburgof the University of Texas at Austinto develop this machine-learning program.The two trained a computer to identify planets beyond our solar system.To do so, it used observations of the minor changesin the brightness of stars when planets passedin front of them that the Kepler Space Telescope had recorded.Shallue and Vanderburg plan to continue hunting for new planets.They plan to use the program to examine the more than 150,000 starsthat the Kepler Space Telescope has already identified.So far, esearchers have confirmed the existence ofmore than 3,560 planets beyond our solar system.The Kepler Space Telescope, which launched in 2009,located about two-thirds of them.Another 4,500 possible exoplanets await confirmation.