🔭 Stargazer 2.0: AI learned to find asteroids
Thanks to artificial intelligence, astronomers became aware that many more asteroids are hovering in the solar system than they used to believe.
🌚 AI algorithms recently detected over 27,500 asteroids previously overlooked by the most powerful telescopes.
Most of the detected space objects hover in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as well as in the vicinity of Neptune. About 150 space rocks are close to Earth's orbit.
🎮 How does this work?
Developed by a team from the Asteroid Institute and the University of Washington, the AI tool studied over 412,000 archival images of the sky stored at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. The algorithm can analyze up to 1.7 billion light dots in just a single telescope image and then compare the position of those points in other images, thus identifying asteroids. The calculations and scaling are done through Google Cloud.
✨ How’s this helpful for humanity?
The new tool makes it easier to find and track millions of asteroids, including potentially dangerous ones that might one day collide with Earth.
For example, AI has already detected a 180-meter-wide space rock expected to approach within 225,000 kilometers of Earth — closer than the average distance between our planet and the moon.
🌟 What are the prospects?
Thanks to AI-powered software, more starry skies will be explored, and more data will be available.
Astronomers plan to use AI algorithms at a new observatory in Chile. A giant 8.4-meter telescope will start taking images of the southern sky every night for at least 10 years beginning next year.
🔍 Researchers hope that in the first 6 months of operations, AI will already help the observatory find as many as 2.4 million new asteroids, including at least 2,000 at close range to Earth — double than those already cataloged.
#news @hiaimediaen
