NASA has announced a press conference for Thursday and is expected to confirm a major discovery about life beyond earth.

The announcement will be made by the team of scientists who have been studying the several thousand planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler is the most successful planet-hunting probe in history, having identified more than 2500 planets with another 2000 candidates that still need to be studied.

Kepler has found several planets orbiting their star in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone," where it is warm enough for liquid water to flow. The announcement may be related to one of those planets.

In issuing the release on the press conference, NASA pointed to a new way of analyzing data from Kepler.

The team at the Kepler Space Telescope has been searching for extra-terrestrial life since 2009, and now they have found something spell bounding. In the course of time, the telescope has found many Earth-sized planets on the habitable zone, and researchers believe that some of them have the possibility to support life. According to NASA officials, this startling discovery was made using machine learning supported by Google.

“The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data,” wrote NASA officials in a recently released press release.