How AI’s data-crunching-power can help demystify the cosmos
New research papers are published almost every week using AI for some new investigation in astronomy: classifying galaxies, identifying solar flares, exploring exoplanet atmospheres, and more. AI’s biggest strength is that it can sort through mountains of data much faster than a human—a skill that’s particularly timely as new telescopes are generating more and more data for astronomers to handle.
“We can use [AI] to tackle problems we couldn’t tackle before because they’re too computationally expensive,” said Daniela Huppenkothen, astronomer and data scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, in MIT Technology Review.
One telescope in particular has many astronomers abuzz about AI: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be completed in January 2025, just a few short months away. Once open, it’ll image the entire night sky every few days for ten whole years in a program known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), generating sixty petabytes of data in that time.
“The massive amount of data that will be gathered in the coming years by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and other large-scale astronomical projects is simply too vast and rich to be fully explored with existing methods,” said NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan in a University of Chicago press release. “With reliable and trustworthy AI in their toolbox, everyone from students to senior researchers will have exciting new ways to gain valuable insights leading to amazing discoveries that might otherwise remain hidden in the data.”
