anomaly detection

Imagine the Hubble Space Telescope has been taking photos for over 30 years, and nobody has had time to look carefully at all of them. There are about 100 million little image stamps sitting in a digital archive, most never closely examined. These researchers built a smart computer system called AnomalyMatch that works a bit like training a dog to sniff out truffles — you show it a few examples of weird, interesting things, and it goes hunting through the entire archive to find more. In just 2 to 3 days, it flagged hundreds of extraordinary cosmic objects: galaxies crashing into each other, galaxies with gas being ripped away so they look like jellyfish, and gravitational lenses where one galaxy bends light from another galaxy behind it like a cosmic magnifying glass. The exciting part is that humans alone would have taken centuries to do this job.