Artificial intelligence discovers secret equation for 'weighing' galaxy clusters

Astrophysicists at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Flatiron Institute and their colleagues have leveraged artificial intelligence to uncover a better way to estimate the mass of colossal clusters of galaxies. The AI discovered that by just adding a simple term to an existing equation, scientists can produce far better mass estimates than they previously had. The improved estimates will enable scientists to calculate the fundamental properties of the universe more accurately, the astrophysicists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's such a simple thing; that's the beauty of this," says study co-author Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, a research scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) in New York City. "Even though it's so simple, nobody before found this term. People have been working on this for decades, and still they were not able to find this."