European Space Agency developed an AI tool that allows them to inspect millions of astronomical images in a fraction of the time it would take a human – they found more than 1300 anomalies in the Hubble archive
European Space Agency developed an AI tool that allows them to inspect millions of astronomical images in a fraction of the time it would take a human – they found more than 1300 anomalies in the Hubble archive
>The team used AnomalyMatch to search through nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, marking the first time the archive has been systematically searched for astrophysical anomalies. In just two and a half days, AnomalyMatch completed its search of the archive and returned a list of likely anomalies.
>As the process of tracking down rare objects still requires an expert eye, David and Pablo personally inspected the sources rated by their algorithm as most likely to be anomalous. Of these, more than 1300 were true anomalies, more than 800 of which had never been documented in the scientific literature.
>The team trained their tool and demonstrated its capabilities using the Hubble Legacy Archive, which contains tens of thousands of datasets spanning Hubble’s long lifetime.
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>The team used AnomalyMatch to search through nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, marking the first time the archive has been systematically searched for astrophysical anomalies. In just two and a half days, AnomalyMatch completed its search of the archive and returned a list of likely anomalies.
>As the process of tracking down rare objects still requires an expert eye, David and Pablo personally inspected the sources rated by their algorithm as most likely to be anomalous. Of these, more than 1300 were true anomalies, more than 800 of which had never been documented in the scientific literature.
>The team trained their tool and demonstrated its capabilities using the Hubble Legacy Archive, which contains tens of thousands of datasets spanning Hubble’s long lifetime.
[https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/1400_quirky_objects_found_in_Hubble_s_archive)
This is a good use of AI. More progress, less slop.
Okay so what did they discover