{"id":395239,"date":"2026-01-28T16:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T16:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/395239\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T16:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T16:01:08","slug":"astronomers-used-ai-to-find-1400-anomalous-objects-from-hubble-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/395239\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers used AI to find 1,400 \u2018anomalous objects\u2019 from Hubble archives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered more than 800 previously undocumented \u201castrophysical anomalies\u201d hiding in Hubble\u2019s archives. To do so, researchers David O\u2019Ryan and Pablo G\u00f3mez trained an AI model to comb through Hubble\u2019s 35-year dataset, hunting for strange objects and flagging them for manual review. It\u2019s \u201ca treasure trove of data in which astrophysical anomalies might be found,\u201d O\u2019Ryan said in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esa.int\/Science_Exploration\/Space_Science\/1400_quirky_objects_found_in_Hubble_s_archive\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Studying space is hard. There\u2019s lots of it, it\u2019s noisy, and the flood of data generated by tools like the Hubble Space Telescope can overwhelm even large research teams. And sometimes space is weird. Very weird. Enter AI, which is great at sifting through massive amounts of information to spot patterns\u2014flagging the oddities astronomers might otherwise miss.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">The model used by the astronomers, dubbed AnomalyMatch, scanned nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, the first time the dataset has been systematically searched for anomalies. Think weirdly shaped galaxies, light warped by the gravity of massive objects, or planet-forming discs seen edge-on. AnomalyMatch took just two and a half days to go through the dataset, far faster than if a human research team had attempted the task.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">The findings, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aanda.org\/articles\/aa\/full_html\/2025\/12\/aa55512-25\/aa55512-25.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics, revealed nearly 1,400 \u201canomalous objects,\u201d most of which were galaxies merging or interacting. Other anomalies included gravitational lenses (light warped into circles or arcs by massive objects in front of them), jellyfish galaxies (which have dangling \u201ctentacles\u201d of gas), and galaxies with large clumps of stars. \u201cPerhaps most intriguing of all, there were several dozen objects that defied classification altogether,\u201d said ESA in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esa.int\/Science_Exploration\/Space_Science\/1400_quirky_objects_found_in_Hubble_s_archive\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">\u201cThis is a fantastic use of AI to maximise the scientific output of the Hubble archive,\u201d said G\u00f3mez. \u201cFinding so many anomalous objects in Hubble data, where you might expect many to have already been found, is a great result. It also shows how useful this tool will be for other large datasets.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered more than 800 previously undocumented \u201castrophysical anomalies\u201d&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[554,50,90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-395239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}