Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence will change the way we interact with the universe. As a science, astronomy has a long tradition of looking for patterns by sifting through massive amounts of data, accidental discoveries, and a deep connection between theory and observation. These are all areas where artificial intelligence systems can make the field of astronomy faster and more powerful than ever before. That said, it’s important to note that “artificial intelligence” is a very broad term encompassing a wide variety of semi-related software tools and techniques. Astronomers most commonly turn to neural networks, where the software learns about all the connections in a training data set, then applies the knowledge of those connections in a real data set. Take, for instance, data processing. The pretty pictures splashed online from the Hubble Space Telescope or James Webb Space Telescope are far from the first pass that those instruments took of that particular patch of sky. Raw astronomical images are full of errors, messy foregrounds, contaminants, artifacts, and noise. Processing and cleaning these images to make something presentable – not to mention useful for scientific research – requires an enormous amount of input, usually done partially manually and partially by automated systems. Increasingly astronomers are turning to artificial intelligence to process the data, pruning out the useless bits of the images to produce a clean result. For example, an image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) first released in 2019 was given a machine learning “makeover” in April 2023, resulting in a much clearer image of the black hole’s structure.
Full opinion : AI is already helping astronomers make incredible discoveries.
