Data Science for Science

Namaskaram! Today we have an application of AI in Astronomy. The Universe is vast. So mind-boggling is its vastness that astronomers need the use of technology to find and classify astronomical objects. The Subaru Telescope, located in Hawaii, USA, had taken numerous images of galaxies from Earth's vantage point. Thanks to its high sensitivity, as many as 560,000 galaxies have been detected in the images. It would be extremely difficult to visually process this large number of galaxies one by one with human eyes for morphological (shape) classification. The AI technique enabled astronomers of the NAOJ (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) to process these galaxies without human intervention. Deep Learning based image classification techniques have been used to classify images based on their pixel-data. You might have heard of the "dog" and "cat" classifier. Well, it turns out Deep Learning is also good at distinguishing galaxies "with spiral patterns