{"id":1061,"date":"2026-01-28T04:51:35","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T20:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/28\/astronomers-discover-over-800-cosmic-anomalies-using-a-new-ai-tool\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T04:51:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T20:51:35","slug":"astronomers-discover-over-800-cosmic-anomalies-using-a-new-ai-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/28\/astronomers-discover-over-800-cosmic-anomalies-using-a-new-ai-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers discover over 800 cosmic anomalies using a new AI tool"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a use of AI that appears to do more good than harm. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) <a target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/esahubble.org\/news\/heic2603\/?lang\" data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\">developed<\/a> a neural network that searches through space images for anomalies. The results were far beyond what human experts could have done. In two and a half days, it sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts, discovering 1,400 anomalous objects.<\/p>\n<p>The creators of the AI model, David O&#8217;Ryan and Pablo G\u00f3mez, call it AnomalyMatch. The pair trained it on (and applied it to) the <a target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/hla.stsci.edu\/\" data-i13n=\"cpos:2;pos:1\">Hubble Legacy Archive<\/a>, which houses tens of thousands of datasets from Hubble&#8217;s 35-year history. &#8220;While trained scientists excel at spotting cosmic anomalies, there&#8217;s simply too much Hubble data for experts to sort through at the necessary level of fine detail by hand,&#8221; the ESA wrote in its press release.<\/p>\n<p>After less than three days of scanning, AnomalyMatch returned a list of likely anomalies. It still requires human eyes at the end: G\u00f3mez and O&#8217;Ryan reviewed the candidates to confirm which were truly abnormal. Among the 1,400 anomalous objects the pair confirmed, more than 800 were previously undocumented.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the results showed galaxies merging or interacting, which can lead to odd shapes or long tails of stars and gas. Others were gravitational lenses. (That&#8217;s where the gravity of a foreground galaxy bends spacetime so that the light from a background galaxy is warped into a circle or arc.) Other discoveries included planet-forming disks viewed edge-on, galaxies with huge clumps of stars and <a target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jellyfish_galaxy\" data-i13n=\"cpos:3;pos:1\">jellyfish galaxies<\/a>. Adding a bit of mystery, there were even &#8220;several dozen objects that defied classification altogether.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is a fantastic use of AI to maximize the scientific output of the Hubble archive,&#8221; G\u00f3mez is quoted as saying in the ESA&#8217;s announcement. &#8220;Finding so many anomalous objects in Hubble data, where you might expect many to have already been found, is a great result. It also shows how useful this tool will be for other large datasets.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This article originally appeared on Engadget at https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/ai\/astronomers-discover-over-800-cosmic-anomalies-using-a-new-ai-tool-205135155.html?src=rss<\/p><p>Please credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/obagg.com\">OBA Blog<\/a> &raquo; <a href=\"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/28\/astronomers-discover-over-800-cosmic-anomalies-using-a-new-ai-tool\/\">Astronomers discover over 800 cosmic anomalies using a new AI tool<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a use of AI that appears to do more good than harm. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) developed a neural network that searches through space images for anomalies. The results were far beyond what human experts could have done. In two and a half days, it sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts, discovering 1,400 anomalous objects. The creators of the AI model, David O&#8217;Ryan and Pablo G\u00f3mez, call it AnomalyMatch. The pair trained it on (and applied it to) the Hubble Legacy Archive, which houses tens of thousands of datasets from Hubble&#8217;s 35-year history. &#8220;While trained scientists excel at spotting cosmic anomalies, there&#8217;s simply too much Hubble data for experts to sort through at the necessary level of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-share"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obagg.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}