Skip to main content

Artificial intelligence discovers dozens of mysterious cosmic signals

One of astronomy’s controversial mysteries is now being investigated by artificial intelligence.

A team of researchers at Breakthrough Listen, a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project spearheaded by the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a machine learning algorithm to sift through cosmic data and identify fast radio bursts, strange and energetic pulses thought to emanate from far-off galaxies. No one knows for sure what causes these radio emissions but theories abound — from highly magnetized neutron stars battling black holes to signs of alien life.

In a recent study, the SETI researchers used a customized A.I. system to discover dozens of previously unidentified fast radio bursts from a source some 3 billion light-years away. The fast radio bursts were picked out from a data set that had already been analyzed by astronomers.

“Artificial Intelligence has seen very rapid development in recent years and its application in medicine, security, finance, and everyday object recognition have already reached certain level of maturity,” Gerry Zhang, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student who helped develop the new machine-learning algorithm, told Digital Trends. “Astronomy represents a relatively unexplored area for A.I. The very large volume of data that astronomers collect present a challenging playground for state-of-the-art A.I. Radio astronomical data themselves presents challenges of large scale and high noise. Learning to apply A.I. to such new data is challenging and fruitful.”

To make the discovery, Zhang and his team used a convolutional neural network, a type of algorithm modeled off the human brain, which has been used to find craters on the moon and help detect earthquakes.

In their recent study, the researchers trained their algorithm on simulated signals, teaching it to recognize signs of fast radio bursts, and then “let the trained network loose on the data containing the real signals,” Zhang said. The result was the discovery of 72 signals that astronomers had previously missed.

The new findings help chip away at the current cosmic mystery of where the fast radio bursts come from. Is it aliens? Probably not. But it could be. Either way, it’s a mystery worth getting to the bottom of. What astronomers need now is more data and better systems to analyze the information.

“Fast radio bursts are one of the most recently discovered unknown signals in astronomy,” Zhang said. “With new instruments being designed for them coming online, [they are] well-poised to be one of the unknowns that will be solved within the next five to 10 years.”

A paper on the research was recently accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Editors' Recommendations

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Space station astronaut marks World Toilet Day with an explainer
A toilet aboard the International Space Station.

To mark World Toilet Day on Sunday, current space station inhabitant Andreas Mogensen has answered one of the most common questions that astronauts get asked: “How do you use the bathroom in space?”

The microgravity conditions aboard the International Space Station (ISS) make it impossible to use a conventional toilet on the orbital outpost. You don’t even want to imagine the mess it would create.

Read more
Elon Musk assesses new launchpad design for Starship
Part of the launchpad structure for the SpaceX's Starship rocket.

SpaceX launched its Starship vehicle for the second time on Saturday.

Unlike the first test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket in April, which ended in a spectacular fireball just a few minutes after launch, this time the second-stage Starship spacecraft managed to successfully separate from the first-stage Super Heavy booster. A few minutes later, however, the booster exploded during its descent, while the spacecraft also failed to complete its flight.

Read more
Stunning James Webb image shows the beating heart of our Milky Way
The full view of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals a 50 light-years-wide portion of the Milky Way’s dense centre. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C (Sgr C) region, along with some as-yet unidentified features. A vast region of ionised hydrogen, shown in cyan, wraps around an infrared-dark cloud, which is so dense that it blocks the light from distant stars behind it. Intriguing needle-like structures in the ionised hydrogen emission lack any uniform orientation. Researchers note the surprising extent of the ionised region, covering about 25 light-years. A cluster of protostars – stars that are still forming and gaining mass – are producing outflows that glow like a bonfire at the base of the large infrared-dark cloud, indicating that they are emerging from the cloud’s protective cocoon and will soon join the ranks of the more mature stars around them. Smaller infrared-dark clouds dot the scene, appearing like holes in the starfield. Researchers say they have only begun to dig into the wealth of unprecedented high-resolution data that Webb has provided on this region, and many features bear detailed study. This includes the rose-coloured clouds on the right side of the image, which have never been seen in such detail.

A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the heart of our galaxy, in a region close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. The image shows a star-forming region where filaments of dust and gas are clumping together to give birth to new baby stars.

The image was captured using Webb's NIRCam instrument, a camera that looks in the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with shorter wavelengths shown in blue and cyan and longer wavelengths shown in yellow and red.

Read more