AI Finds Hundreds of Hidden Space Oddities. © NASA/Hubble & NASA, D. O’Ryan, P. Gómez
Astronomers have used a new AI-powered technique to uncover rare objects hidden in the Hubble Space Telescope’s vast archive.
In just two and a half days, the system scanned nearly 100 million image cutouts and identified about 1,400 unusual objects, over 800 of which had never been seen or recorded before.
These rare finds include colliding galaxies, gravitational lenses, and ring-shaped galaxies. They are extremely valuable for science but very hard to spot as telescope data continues to grow at an enormous rate.
To tackle this challenge, researchers David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez from the European Space Agency created an AI tool that can quickly examine millions of space images. They tested it on the Hubble Legacy Archive, which holds decades of observations, showing that AI can reveal important discoveries that might otherwise remain buried in the data.
“Archival observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now stretch back 35 years, providing a treasure trove of data in which astrophysical anomalies might be found,” says David O’Ryan, lead author of the research paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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