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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 04 2017, @03:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-can-it-compose-a-sonnet? dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) combined an "artificial brain" with observations from the advanced Gaia space satellite to discover six stars darting across our galaxy following as-yet-poorly-understood encounters with Milky Way's supermassive black hole.

"These hypervelocity stars are extremely important to study the overall structure of our Milky Way," said Elena Maria Rossi, from Leiden University in the Netherlands, who announced the discovery at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Prague last week.

"These are stars that have traveled great distances through the Galaxy but can be traced back to its core – an area so dense and obscured by interstellar gas and dust that it is normally very difficult to observe – so they yield crucial information about the gravitational field of the Milky Way from the center to its outskirts."

[...] "We chose to use an artificial neural network, which is software designed to mimic how our brain works," said Tommaso Marchetti, a PhD student at Leiden University and the lead author of the paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that details the discovery.

"After proper 'training,' it can learn how to recognize certain objects or patterns in a huge dataset," said Marchetti. "In our case, we taught it to spot hypervelocity stars in a stellar catalogue like the one compiled with Gaia."

Source: https://www.rt.com/news/395087-gaia-hypervelocity-stars-milky/


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 04 2017, @05:05AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 04 2017, @05:05AM (#534685) Homepage
    A decade ago, this would have been done using a massive collaboration of amateur volunteers. Hoorah, we humans had our "more accurate and productive than computers (mostly by sheer force of numbers)" hayday in the field of astronomy too - it lasted all of a decade.
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