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Powerful new AI technique detects and classifies galaxies in astronomy image data:

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a powerful new computer program called Morpheus that can analyze astronomical image data pixel by pixel to identify and classify all of the galaxies and stars in large data sets from astronomy surveys.

Morpheus is a deep-learning framework that incorporates a variety of artificial intelligence technologies developed for applications such as image and speech recognition. Brant Robertson, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics who leads the Computational Astrophysics Research Group at UC Santa Cruz, said the rapidly increasing size of astronomy data sets has made it essential to automate some of the tasks traditionally done by astronomers.

"There are some things we simply cannot do as humans, so we have to find ways to use computers to deal with the huge amount of data that will be coming in over the next few years from large astronomical survey projects," he said.

[...] The morphologies of galaxies, from rotating disk galaxies like our own Milky Way to amorphous elliptical and spheroidal galaxies, can tell astronomers about how galaxies form and evolve over time. Large-scale surveys, such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to be conducted at the Vera Rubin Observatory now under construction in Chile, will generate huge amounts of image data, and Robertson has been involved in planning how to use that data to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies. LSST will take more than 800 panoramic images each night with a 3.2-billion-pixel camera, recording the entire visible sky twice each week.

[...] When Morpheus processes an image of an area of the sky, it generates a new set of images of that part of the sky in which all objects are color-coded based on their morphology, separating astronomical objects from the background and identifying point sources (stars) and different types of galaxies. The output includes a confidence level for each classification. Running on UCSC's lux supercomputer, the program rapidly generates a pixel-by-pixel analysis for the entire data set.

"Morpheus provides detection and morphological classification of astronomical objects at a level of granularity that doesn't currently exist," Hausen said.

More information:Astrophysical Journal Supplement (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4365/ab8868

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