How can AI help us to explore the Universe

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Have you ever thought how little we know about the Universe? Every day we make efforts to understand it more and more, and gather so much information that we don’t know what to do with. Satellites gather hundreds of terabytes of data each year, and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope that’s is currently under construction in Chile will provide 15 terabytes of pictures of space every night. We are not capable of sifting through all the information, it’s just impossible for the astronomers to do it. As astronomer Carlo Enrico Petrillo told The Verge“Looking at images of galaxies is the most romantic part of our job. The problem is staying focused.” That’s why he trained an AI program to do the hard work for him.

Petrillo and his team of astronomers were searching for a phenomenon that’s commonly referred to as space telescope. When a massive object (a galaxy or a black hole) comes between a distant light source and an observer on Earth, it bends the space and light around it, creating a lens that gives astronomers a closer look at incredibly old, distant parts of the Universe that should be blocked from view. Astronomers refer to it as gravitational lens, and they might be the key to understand the secrets of the Universe, its origins and what it’s made of. Unfortunately, the process of manually looking for them is extremely tedious and slow. This is where AI comes in, with the ability to spend less than a second for looking at a picture. The program is fed data in form of visual information, and starts to recognize a certain pattern, which it later uses to find objects that we are looking for. As of now, the program is capable of identifying gravitational lenses in less than a second.

So, what are other uses of AI in astronomy? Researchers developed many tools that help them. Some, like Petrillo’s, are taking on the job of identification: classifying galaxies, for example. Some have been used to identify pulsar stars, locate unusual exoplanets, or sharpen up low-res telescope imagery. Some tools are used for even more than just organizing and sifting through data, and create the information by filling the spots in our observations.

But are astronomers worried that we put so much trust into AI?  Petrillo says he’s not bothered. “In general, humans are more biased, less efficient, and more prone to mistakes than machines.” A more common implementation of Artificial Intelligence might allow us to explore the stars sooner that expected.

Sources:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/15/16654352/ai-astronomy-space-exploration-data

https://www.lsst.org/

 

One thought on “How can AI help us to explore the Universe

  1. Rudko Karolina says:

    Very interesting post, I think implementing AI into exploring the universe will make us understand faster the changes in the universe and give us more detailed knowledge about future of Earth

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