Thousands of galaxies classified in the blink of an eye

Astronomers have designed and trained a computer program that can classify tens of thousands of galaxies in just a few seconds, a task that usually takes months to accomplish. In research published today, astrophysicists from Australia have used machine learning to speed up a process that is often done manually by astronomers and citizen scientists around the world. "Galaxies come in different shapes and sizes," said lead author Mitchell Cavanagh, a Ph.D. candidate based at the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). "Classifying the shapes of galaxies is an important step in understanding their formation and evolution, and can even shed light on the nature of the Universe itself." Cavanagh said that with larger surveys of the sky happening all the time, astronomers are collecting too many galaxies to look at and classify on their own.