US EditionResearchers Use AI To Find Astronomical Anomalies Buried In Archives
- On January 27, 2026 David Patrick O'Ryan and Pablo Gómez used AnomalyMatch to search nearly 100 million cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive and confirmed over 1,300 anomalies.
- Hubble's archive holds more than 1.7 million observations, overwhelming manual review, and citizen science initiatives fall short, prompting David Patrick O'Ryan and Pablo Gómez to develop an AI-assisted tool.
- Among the flagged targets were gravitational lenses, ring galaxies, jellyfish galaxies, massive star-forming clumps, edge-on planet-forming disks, several dozen unclassifiable objects, and six highlighted previously undiscovered objects.
- The work demonstrates how AI can increase the scientific return from archival data, as neural networks like AnomalyMatch maximize value and prepare for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, ESA's Euclid, and Vera C. Rubin Observatory surveys.
- After the algorithm flagged candidates, researchers manually reviewed top-ranked images and confirmed true anomalies, with AnomalyMatch working on small image cutouts for scalability.
22 Articles
22 Articles
European Space Agency uses AI to identify NASA’s Hubble telescope anomalies
European astronomers are using AI to help explain mysterious images across NASA’s catalog of Hubble Space Telescope data, spanning 35 years. The team at the European Space Agency developed a neural network called AnomalyMatch, which analyzes patterns in images and detects unusual objects, according to NASA. They applied the tool across 100 million image cutouts, identifying 1,300 rare phenomena pictured — 800 of which had never been previously d…
A team of astronomers has discovered nearly 1,400 rare objects, more than 800 of which had never been recorded before.
Researchers Use AI To Find Astronomical Anomalies Buried In Archives
AI faces strong skepticism due to its potential for misuse, its drain on resources, and even its potential dumbing down of students. But new results illustrate its uses. A team of astronomers have used a new AI-assisted method to search for rare astronomical objects in the Hubble Legacy Archive. The team sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days, uncovering nearly 1400 anomalous objects, more than 800 of which h…
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