Pan video: New astronomical objects

Six previously-undiscovered, weird and fascinating astrophysical objects are highlighted in this video, which showcases images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These were discovered by researchers from the European Space Agency using a new AI-assisted method. The AI tool allowed them to search nearly 100 million image cutouts and uncover anomalous objects including gravitational lenses, jellyfish galaxies with gaseous ‘tentacles’, merging and interacting galaxies, galaxies featuring rings and arcs and more.

This collection features six galaxies, showing a cross-section of the discoveries with some of the more striking examples: three lenses with arcs distorted by gravity, one galactic merger, one ring galaxy, and one galaxy — not alone in the results — which defied classification. To detect anomalous objects like these six, the researchers developed an AI tool capable of searching and recognising patterns in images, and trained it with examples of types of unusual objects that they wanted to find. They then used their algorithm to examine the entire set of data from Hubble’s archive in search of further anomalous objects, over the course of just a couple of days. The result was a ranking of which images contained objects most likely to be anomalous. After inspecting the results from their AI tool, the team confirmed almost 1400 anomalies, of which over 800 were previously unknown. With even larger datasets on the way from missions including ESA’s Euclid, the hope is that AI tools such as this one can help astronomers to make the absolute most of their observations.