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A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool and a fully automated process have successfully detected, identified, and classified its first supernova. Such technologies could take the grunt work away from astronomers, giving them more time to develop and test new hypotheses to explain the universe.
The AI tool is called BTSbot and no, the researchers were not fans of the wildly popular South Korean boy band. BTSBot stands for Bright Transient Survey Bot, and it was developed by an international group of researchers led by Northwestern University. Apart from rapidly accelerating the process of analysing and classifying new supernovas, the bot might even be able to bypass human errors.
Humans have spent more than 2,2000 hours over the past six years, visually inspecting and classifying supernova candidates, according to the university. The development of this tool means that researchers can redirect this time to other responsibilities.
Right now, supernovae are detected with a process that uses both humans and software. BTSbot can essentially cut out the human part of this process, allowing for discovery and analysis without human intervention. It was trained on more than 1.4 million historical images from 16,000 astronomical sources.
“For the first time ever, a series of robots and AI algorithms has observed, then identified, then communicated with another telescope to finally confirm the discovery of a supernovae. This represents an important step forward as further refinement of models will allow the robots to isolate specific subtypes of stellar explosions. Ultimately, removing humans from the loop provides more time for the research team to analyse their observations and develop new hypotheses to explain the origin of the cosmic explosions that we observe,” said Adam Miller, who led the researcher, in a press statement.
