AI unlocks hundreds of cosmic anomalies in Hubble archive

A team of astronomers has employed a cutting-edge, artificial intelligence–assisted technique to uncover rare astronomical phenomena within archived data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance in just two and a half days—more than 800 of which had never been documented in scientific literature.