Astronomers Use AI To Find 1,300 Anomalies

ESA researchers David O'Ryan and Pablo Gómez report in Astronomy and Astrophysics they used the AnomalyMatch framework to scan nearly 100 million Hubble Legacy Archive image cutouts and identified about 1,300 anomalous objects, more than 800 previously undocumented. The tool processed the dataset in two to three days on a single GPU, surfacing 417 merging galaxies, 86 candidate gravitational lenses and 35 jellyfish galaxies, demonstrating scalable AI can boost discovery in archival and upcoming survey data.