Machine learning gives astronomers a hand

Huge optical observatories and giant mushroom-like radio antennas now do the job. And to spot new events such as supernovas or pulsars, scientists use automated surveys to scan the sky day in and day out. But here comes the problem. While such surveys find plenty of'candidates', it then takes astronomers a lot of time to sift through the data and filter out events that don't look promising. Given the huge volume of data available today, it has become impossible to do manually - and that's where machine learning comes in, as an efficient method to analyse large data sets obtained by modern telescopes.