Hubble’s archive hides peculiarities – 800 strange space images are confusing

A space telescope Hubblen more than one hundred million photos have been stored in the archives.

Hubble has been taking them for over 35 years. It sent its first images from space at the end of May 1990 and opened up completely new vistas.

It is estimated that Hubble still exposes around 50–100 images per day. Hubble is still taking pictures almost non-stop, even though it had to be powered down already in the 2010s.

Space organizations do not give exact figures for the number of images. The reason is that the shooting dates and the compositions of the images vary.

However, no one has had time to study all the Hubble images. Some of the pictures have been left waiting for later review.

Hubblen surprises have now been revealed from the archives when artificial intelligence was put to work on stored images.

Artificial intelligence sifted through almost one hundred million image recordings Hubble Legacy Archiven from the archive, says the European Space Agency Esa’s announcement.

It only took the AI ​​two and a half days to go through the entire archive.

Artificial intelligence found more than 800 “cosmic anomalies” in the images that have not been observed by humans before, says the science magazine Scientific American.

They had galaxy mergers, jellyfish galaxies, and other unusual features. Jellyfish galaxies are named after the gas tentacles trailing the galaxy

There were also dozens of possible gravitational lenses. It means that a massive object, such as a galaxy, refracts light from a source behind it.

According to NASA, the US space agency, many of the images show galaxies that are anomalous in some way. They merge or have unusual shapes, such as long streams of stars and gas, says website Live Science.

However, there are no easy explanations for ten items. Published the results of the image search science magazine Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Contributed to the development of research artificial intelligence Pablo Gomez says artificial intelligence provides a model for exploring space science archives. They contain a lot of data that has not had time to be studied and interpreted. Gómez was a co-author of the article.

Hubble has gained company, and astronomy image archives are filling up faster than before.

A space telescope more accurate and better than Hubble James Webb has been photographing alongside Hubble for more than three years. Webb announced his first images at the beginning of July 2022.