Artificial intelligence depicts stars and galaxies for astronomers | Science

Astronomical images after the intervention of artificial intelligence became 38% better compared to traditional image enhancement tools, which is a step closer to the quality of space telescopes.

An international team led by researchers from Northwestern University in the US has been able to use artificial intelligence techniques to improve the quality of astronomical images captured by ground-based telescopes to help astronomers all over the world improve their research work. Made artificial intelligence tools available for free.

According to the results study Accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomical images after the intervention of artificial intelligence are 38% better compared to traditional image enhancement tools, bringing an important step forward in the quality of telescopes.

An artificial intelligence machine works like our brain, where scientists can feed large amounts of data, and then through a “machine learning” mechanism, it looks for similar and different patterns in that data, and then detects astronomical image errors. , and deletes them automatically.

Why are astronomical images so important?

Images are the most important tools for an astronomer. Just as a biologist uses a microscope, an astronomer uses a telescope to study his research world. Images are the main product of research telescopes, and accordingly, any small effect on these images will be affected. Results of special studies.

And for this reason Agencies like NASA Space telescopes such as Hubble or James Webb, because Earth’s atmosphere contains pockets of heterogeneous air, are responsible for the appearance of twinkling stars in the night sky in the first place.

So, while the Hubble telescope mirror, for example, is much smaller than the largest ground-based observatories, the telescope’s unique location above the Earth’s atmosphere gives it amazing clarity.

New Lab

According to the official press release of Northwestern UniversityAfter testing these techniques on several astronomical images, the researchers applied them to Vera c. Rubin installed the monitoring system, which is currently preparing to begin actual work in the “Cerro Banzon” region of northern Chile within several years.

The telescope’s mirror has a diameter of 8.4 meters and specializes in studying large areas of the night sky. At one time, it can observe an area of ​​the night sky 50 times the size of the entire moon, and the telescope has the world’s largest and most powerful camera, which takes images with a resolution of 3.2 billion pixels.

Thanks to new technology, the observatory will be able to draw more precise maps of our Milky Way Galaxy, as well as study dark energy and matter, as well as map smaller objects in the Solar System, especially near-Earth asteroids.