Classifying galaxies with Artificial Intelligence

A research group, consisting of astronomers mainly from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), applied a deep-learning technique, a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to classify galaxies in a large dataset of images obtained with the Subaru Telescope. Thanks to its high sensitivity, as many as 560.000 galaxies have been detected in the images. It would be extremely difficult to visually process this large number of galaxies one by one with human eyes for morphological classification. The AI enabled the team to perform the processing without human intervention. Automated processing techniques for extraction and judgment of features with deep-learning algorithms have been rapidly developed since 2012.