Artificial intelligence helps fast analyze gravitational lenses - Xinhua

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have shown that neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence, can analyze the complex distortions in spacetime known as gravitational lenses 10 million times faster than traditional methods. The work, by a research team at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford, was detailed in a study published in Nature. The researchers used neural networks to analyze images of strong gravitational lensing, where the image of a faraway galaxy is multiplied and distorted into rings and arcs by the gravity of a massive object, such as a galaxy cluster. The distortions provide clues about how mass is distributed in space and how that distribution changes over time, which are linked to invisible dark matter that makes up 85 percent of all matter in the universe and to dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Until now, analyzing such images has been a tedious process that involves comparing actual images of lenses with a large number of computer simulations of mathematical lensing models, according to a news release from SLAC, originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.