An international team of scientists has developed an AI system known as Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot) to detect supernovas and what it has achieved is simply historic! (Pixabay)

AI Successfully Identifies Supernova Without Human Assistance

Jim HendlerOctober 17, 23 Artificial Intelligence

The evolution of artificial intelligence has proven to be a great help to humanity in many ways, although it suffers from terrifying hallucinations that forced OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to say that he had the least confidence in the responses of the AI ChatGPT chatbot. However, on a more positive note, AI has helped in a groundbreaking achievement in the field of astronomy. Artificial intelligence has detected and confirmed a supernova for the first time even without human intervention.
An international team of researchers developed an artificial intelligence system known as the Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot) that uses machine learning to perform the entire process of finding, confirming and classifying supernovae.
According to reports from Northwestern University, this innovative artificial intelligence system not only minimizes the risk of human error, but also significantly speeds up the process of finding a supernova.
BTSbot was trained on a huge dataset of over 1.4 million images from nearly 16,000 sources, providing the system with the necessary information to identify cosmic explosions.
According to a report by Science alert.com, Northwestern astronomer Adam Miller, one of BTSbot’s lead scientists, emphasizes that eliminating human involvement gives research teams more time to analyze their observations and formulate hypotheses about cosmic explosions.
Nabeel Rehemtulla, an astronomer at Northwestern who led BTSbot’s development, emphasizes, “This…helps us better understand the life cycle of stars and the origin of elements created by supernovae, such as carbon, iron and gold.”
BTSbot spotted the new supernova, called SN2023tyk, from data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic camera in California that scans the northern sky every two days.
Notably, BTSbot managed to identify the supernova within just two days of ZTF filming the cosmic explosion. The robotic camera captured the cosmic explosion on October 3rd, and BTSbot found the supernova in the ZTF data on October 5th.
Astronomers have previously spent thousands of hours manually checking candidates for spectroscopic observations, and this has proven to be a huge time saver.
The introduction of artificial intelligence systems opens up opportunities for astronomers to focus on data interpretation and a deeper understanding of the complex processes of the universe. Since there is a huge shortage of personnel in space research, this new technology makes it possible to map completely new worlds in a very short time, saving resources and effort.

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