AI helps track down mysterious cosmic radio bursts

Breakthrough Listen researchers used artificial intelligence to search through radio signals recorded from a fast radio burst, capturing many more than humans could. Artificial intelligence is invading many fields, most recently astronomy and the search for intelligent life in the universe, or SETI. Researchers at Breakthrough Listen, a SETI project led by the University of California, Berkeley, have now used machine learning to discover 72 new fast radio bursts from a mysterious source some 3 billion light years from Earth. Fast radio bursts are bright pulses of radio emission mere milliseconds in duration, thought to originate from distant galaxies. The source of these emissions is still unclear, however.