Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) | 2017 Oct 23
Finding Strong Gravitational Lenses in the Kilo Degree Survey with Convolutional Neural Networks - C. E. Petrillo et alA group of astronomers from the universities of Groningen, Naples and Bonn has developed a method that finds gravitational lenses in enormous piles of observations. The method is based on the same artificial intelligence algorithm that Google, Facebook and Tesla have been using in the last years....
When a galaxy is hidden behind another galaxy, we can sometimes see the hidden one around the front system. This phenomenon is called a gravitational lens, because it emerges from Einstein's general relativity theory which says that mass can bend light. Astronomers search for gravitational lenses because they help in the research of dark matter.
The hunt for gravitational lenses is painstaking. Astronomers have to sort thousands of images. They are assisted by enthusiastic volunteers around the world. So far, the search was more or less in line with the availability of new images. But thanks to new observations with special telescopes that reflect large sections of the sky, millions of images are added. Humans cannot keep up with that pace.
To tackle the growing amount of images, the astronomers have used so-called 'convolutional neural networks'. ...
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 472(1):1129 (Nov 2017) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx2052
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1702.07675 > 24 Feb 2017 (v1), 23 Aug 2017 (v2)
