Astronomers are enlisting AI to prepare for a data downpour

It's a problem that will be repeated in other places over the coming decade. As astronomers construct giant cameras to image the entire sky and launch infrared telescopes to hunt for distant planets, they will collect data on unprecedented scales. "We really are not ready for that, and we should all be freaking out," says Cecilia Garraffo, a computational astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "When you have too much data and you don't have the technology to process it, it's like having no data." In preparation for the information deluge, astronomers are turning to AI for assistance, optimizing algorithms to pick out patterns in large and notoriously finicky data sets.