Out of This World: Scientists Embrace AI to Classify New Galaxies

The universe is coming into clearer view, thanks to artificial intelligence. Leveraging the deep learning techniques of AI, a research group of astronomers mainly from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) have achieved extremely high accuracy for finding and classifying spiral galaxies. The group applied AI to an ultra-wide field-of-view images of the distant Universe observed by the Subaru Telescope and were able to classify as many as 560,00 galaxies from those images, according to the NAOJ. Previously, the amount visible in these images would have been impossible to be counted individually and detected by the human eye and therefore unable to be classified. However, the AI technique allowed the researchers to perform this massive pricing without any human contribution, the NAOJ said.