Rediscovering orbital mechanics with machine learning

Abstract

We present an approach for using machine learning to automatically discover the governing equations and unknown properties (in this case, masses) of real physical systems from observations. We train a ‘graph neural network’ to simulate the dynamics of our Solar System’s Sun, planets, and large moons from 30 years of trajectory data. We then use symbolic regression to correctly infer an analytical expression for the force law implicitly learned by the neural network, which our results showed is equivalent to Newton’s law of gravitation. The key assumptions our method makes are translational and rotational equivariance, and Newton’s second and third laws of motion. It did not, however, require any assumptions about the masses of planets and moons or physical constants, but nonetheless, they, too, were accurately inferred with our method. Naturally, the classical law of gravitation has been known since Isaac Newton, but our results demonstrate that our method can discover unknown laws and hidden properties from observed data.