It seems that the power of AI is intensifying at an extremely rapid pace. According to the latest reports, it seems that Artificial Intelligence is helping astronomers make amazing and extremely useful discoveries. Check out the latest reports about this below.

AI is helping astronomers

World Space Week 2023 has arrived, and Space.com has taken the opportunity to examine the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on astronomy and space exploration. As the space age celebrates its 66th anniversary, Paul Sutter discusses how AI is already helping astronomers make new and incredible discoveries.

Artificial intelligence is set to change the way we interact with the universe, whether we like it or not. Astronomy, as a science, has a long history of sifting through vast amounts of data, making accidental discoveries, and establishing a deep connection between theory and observation in search of patterns.

These are all areas where artificial intelligence systems can make the field of astronomy faster and more powerful than ever before.

It is worth noting, however, that “artificial intelligence” is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of semi-related software tools and techniques.

Neural networks are the most commonly used tool in astronomy, where the software learns about all the connections in a training data set and then applies that knowledge to a real data set.

Processing astronomical data is a complex task.

The initial images captured by instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope are often filled with errors, noise, contaminants, and messy foregrounds. It takes an enormous amount of effort to clean and process these images to make them presentable and useful for scientific research.

This process is usually carried out partially manually and partially by automated systems. With advancements in technology, astronomers are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to process the data. AI systems can prune out the useless bits of the images, producing a cleaner and clearer result.

For instance, a machine learning algorithm was used to enhance an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) that was first released in 2019. The result was a much clearer and detailed image of the black hole’s structure.

Using AI for classifying galaxies

Astronomers are utilizing AI to classify galaxies faster and with greater accuracy. They input images of galaxies into a neural network algorithm and train it with a classification scheme derived from manual assignments by researchers or volunteers.

Once the algorithm is trained, it can be applied to real data and automatically classify the galaxies. This process is far less prone to errors and much faster than manual classification. Additionally, AI is used to eliminate optical interference created by Earth’s atmosphere from images of space captured by ground-based telescopes.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to assist us in various scientific fields such as astronomy. Scientists have proposed using AI to detect signs of life on Mars, understand the sun’s corona’s high temperature, and determine the ages of stars.

Astronomers are also using neural networks to explore the universe more deeply than ever before. Cosmologists have now begun employing AI to comprehend the fundamental nature of the cosmos. Two of the most significant mysteries of the universe are dark matter and dark energy, which are substances beyond our current knowledge of physics.

These two substances account for over 95% of all the energy in the universe. Cosmologists are currently attempting to measure the characteristics of dark matter and dark energy to help identify them.

The properties they are trying to measure include how much dark matter and dark energy there is, and how they have evolved throughout the history of the universe.

Even the tiniest changes in the properties of dark matter and dark energy can have significant consequences on the history of the cosmos, influencing everything from the formation of galaxies to the star formation rates in galaxies such as our Milky Way.

Cosmologists are using neural networks

Cosmologists are using neural networks to unravel the complex effects of dark matter and dark energy. They use computer simulations to generate training data by varying the properties of dark matter and dark energy and then feed the results into the neural network.

The neural network then discovers different ways in which these factors change the universe.

Although this approach is still in development, the hope is that cosmologists will be able to apply the neural network to real observations and use it to determine the composition of the universe.

With modern astronomical observatories producing huge amounts of data, approaches like this are becoming increasingly important.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a cutting-edge facility currently under construction in Chile, will provide over 60 petabytes of raw data in the form of high-resolution images of the sky. Parsing that amount of data is beyond the capabilities of most graduate students; only computers, aided by artificial intelligence, will be capable of analyzing it.

Of particular interest to the upcoming observatory will be the search for the unexpected. For instance, the astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus by accident during a regular survey of the night sky.

With the use of artificial intelligence, it is possible to flag and report potentially interesting objects by identifying anything that doesn’t fit an established pattern. In fact, astronomers have already used AI to spot a potentially dangerous asteroid by using an algorithm specifically designed for the Vera C. Rubin observatory.

You can check out the complete article on Space.com in order to learn more interesting details.

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