Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

Scientists at the University of Hawaii’s Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have used AI to produce the world’s largest 3D catalog of stars, galaxies, and quasars.

The team developed the map using an optical survey of three-quarters of the sky produced by the Pan-STARRS observatory on Haleakalā, Maui.

They trained an algorithm to identify celestial objects in the survey by feeding it spectroscopic measurements that provide definitive object classifications and distances.

“Utilizing a state-of-the-art optimization algorithm, we leveraged the spectroscopic training set of almost 4 million light sources to teach the neural network to predict source types and galaxy distances, while at the same time correcting for light extinction by dust in the Milky Way,” said lead study author Robert Beck, a former cosmology postdoctoral fellow at IfA.

This enabled the neural network to achieve a classification accuracy of 98.1% for galaxies, 97.8% for stars, and 96.6% for quasars.

"Ria.ru"