We use AI in almost every area of our lives, including healthcare, marketing, education, facial recognition, etc. I want to devote this article to a less widespread but still significant and fascinating topic – the application of AI in astronomy.
Sea of data
Modern astronomy technologies are being advanced extremely fast. We are developing much more sophisticated telescopes of various types, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope. The struggle is now to process all the obtained data and derive the required information as fast as possible. An average observatory, for instance, produces terabytes of data every night (it is thousands of gigabytes, which is enormous). Hence, scientists can’t help but drown in this tremendous amount of information. AI is more than ready to analyze everything for us though.
How is AI looking at the stars?
First and foremost, AI is helpful with picture processing and analysis. Scientists get giant image collections every night where most galaxies look like tiny dots. It would be impossible for humans to go through every photo made by each telescope. Therefore, machine learning comes into the picture. It consists of algorithms, including neural networks, that can learn from data and make classification decisions. For instance, ML is useful for finding rare lensed galaxies whose light was disturbed by massive cosmic clusters. The AI model is trained on a large dataset of labeled inputs, where each image is marked as a lanse or non-lense. By processing all this data ML model learns how to find the unique patterns and features associated with the deformed galaxies, so it can classify new unseen cases accurately.
Secondly, astronomers often use AI to improve the simulations of infrequent or hardly observed events in space: simulations of the universe’s formation after the Big Bang or the merging of stars or black holes. Using only the computational power to do the job is ineffective and requires too much time. In the meantime, AI algorithms are good at mimicking and can be used as substitutions for parts of the simulations or the entire process, providing much more efficient and swift results.
Also, AI has been revolutionary in alert systems and real-time analyses. It immediately scans captured pictures and can be trained to recognize rare phenomena, for example, supernovas. The star explosions are relatively quick cosmic events that last up to a few days. Hence, it is critical to detect the blast as fast as possible and direct all available cameras to observe the occasion from various locations.
The influence
In conclusion, the development of AI and ML has had a huge impact on modern astronomy. AI can deal with enormous portions of information in a relatively brief time and still deliver reasonable accuracy. Moreover, Artificial Intelligence opens unexplored horizons to surprising cosmos discoveries as it is not only efficient in massive data processing but also goes far beyond humans’ logic, vision, and perception.
Ciprijanovic, A. (2023, April 3). Artificial intelligence in astrophysics – Public lecture by Dr. Aleksandra Ciprijanovic[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqzPKyJSDOo&t=1752sDjorgovski, S. G., Mahabal, A. A., Graham, M. J., Polsterer, K., & Krone-Martins, A. (2022, December). Applications of AI in astronomy. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366027367_Applications_of_AI_in_Astronomy
