{"id":23759,"date":"2022-07-25T09:20:49","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T13:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/?p=23759"},"modified":"2022-07-22T09:25:38","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T13:25:38","slug":"how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/?p=23759","title":{"rendered":"How artificial intelligence is changing astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0How artificial intelligence is changing astronomy<\/p>\n
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Machine learning has become an essential piece of astronomers\u2019 toolkits.<\/em><\/div>\n
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By Ashley Spindler<\/a> \u00a0|\u00a0 Published: Friday, July 15, 2022<\/div>\n
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When most people picture an astronomer, they think of a lone person sitting on top of a mountain, peering into a massive telescope. Of course, that image is out of date: Digital cameras have long since done away with the need to actually look<\/em> though a telescope.<\/p>\n

But now the face of astronomy is changing again. With the advent of more powerful computers and sky surveys that generate unimaginable quantities of data, artificial intelligence is the go-to tool for the keen researcher of space. But where is all of this data coming from? And how can computers help us learn about the universe?<\/p>\n

AI\u2019s appetite for data<\/h2>\n

Chances are you\u2019ve heard the terms \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d and \u201cmachine learning\u201d thrown around recently, and while they are often used together, they actually refer to different things. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term used to describe any kind of computational behavior that mimics the way humans think and perform tasks. Machine learning (ML) is a little more specific: It\u2019s a family of technologies that learn to make predictions and decisions based on vast quantities of historical data. Crucially, ML creates models which exhibit behavior that is not pre-programmed, but learned from the data used to train it.<\/p>\n

The facial recognition in your smartphone, the spam filter in your emails, and the ability of digital assistants like Siri or Alexa to understand speech are all examples of machine learning being used in the real world. Many of these technologies are now being used by astronomers to investigate the mysteries of space and time. Astronomy and machine learning are a match made in the heavens, because if there\u2019s one thing astronomers have too much of \u2014 and ML models can\u2019t get enough of \u2014 it\u2019s data.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re all familiar with megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), and terabytes (TB), but data at that scale is old news in astronomy. These days, we\u2019re interested in petabytes (PB). A petabyte is about one thousand TB, a million GB, or a billion MB. It would take around 10 PB of storage to hold every single feature-length movie ever made in 4K resolution \u2014 and it would take over a hundred years to watch them all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

READ MOREhttps:\/\/astronomy.com\/news\/2022\/07\/how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-astronomy<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0How artificial intelligence is changing astronomy Machine learning has become an essential piece of astronomers\u2019 toolkits. By Ashley Spindler \u00a0|\u00a0 Published: Friday, July 15, 2022 When most people picture an astronomer, they think of a lone person sitting on top of a mountain, peering into a massive telescope. Of course, that image is out of … Continue reading How artificial intelligence is changing astronomy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":645,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[133],"tags":[381,1679],"class_list":["post-23759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy-news","tag-ai","tag-machine-learning"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/645"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23760,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23759\/revisions\/23760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}