In the past few years, the field of artificial intelligence has exploded with huge leaps and bounds of progress. Scientists have now found a way to take an intelligent AI and use it to analyze images of distant galaxies – revealing key information about galactic evolution. When we learn more about the distant galaxies around us, we learn more about our own Galaxy and how and why it works the way it does. By taking a deep learning algorithm and applying it to the study of other galaxies, we may finally have the tools we need to truly understand galactic evolution. The main way in which this new ability to study galactic evolution is useful is due to the fact that the majority of the galaxies around us formed over billions of years, with our telescopes only capable of giving us a small snapshot of the history of the systems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being applied to a number of fields, but just recently, a group of researchers managed to train a deep learning algorithm -- a branch of AI -- to analyze images of distant galaxies and reveal how they formed and evolved over time. Understanding galactic evolution is one of the key puzzles in gaining more insight into the formation of our universe. We have a bunch of ground and space-based telescopes that can peer through the cosmos and capture these galaxies, but understanding every stage of evolution for an individual galactic candidate hasn't entirely been possible. This is because galaxies change their face over several billion years and our telescopes can only show how a galaxy looked at one particular period of time. As light from distant space objects takes millions to billions of years to travel, we always have the option to peer deeper into the cosmos and look back in time at other younger galaxies.