Move over, human astronomers! Artificial intelligence (AI) could soon be doing all of your supernova trying to find you.
A brand new, fully automated machine-learning algorithm has successfully detected, identified and classified its first supernova — the primary time this has been achieved with AI. This system, called Shiny Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot), could vastly speed up the strategy of analyzing and classifying supernovas, its developers say.
Spotting supernovas currently depends upon humans and computers working in conjunction, but BTSbot could cut us out of that equation. In accordance with the BTSbot team, over the past six years alone, human astronomers have spent an estimated 2,200 hours visually inspecting and classifying supernova candidates. BTSbot could allow astronomers to redirect this effort and spend more time investigating the origins of those stellar explosions and modeling how they proceed.
“For the primary time ever, a series of robots and AI algorithms have observed, then identified, then communicated with one other telescope to finally confirm the invention of a supernova,” team leader Adam Miller, a professor of physics at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a press release. “This represents a very important step forward as further refinement of models will allow the robots to isolate specific subtypes of stellar explosions.
“Ultimately, removing humans from the loop provides more time for the research team to investigate their observations and develop recent hypotheses to clarify the origin of the cosmic explosions that we observe,” Miller added.
Supernovas: a needle in a cosmic haystack
Many supernovas occur when dying stars exhauts their fuel for nuclear fusion. Unable to support themselves against the inward push of gravity, these stars’ cores collapse while their outer layers blast out as supernovas.
Within the case of Type Ia supernovas, explosions are triggered when a stellar remnant called a white dwarf exists in a binary system and is stripping matter from its companion star. This influx of fabric causes white dwarfs to reignite and explode, destroying them entirely.
These supernova explosions could be so brilliant that they outshine the combined light of each star within the galaxy around them. Because of the vastness of space, nevertheless, even this incredible burst of sunshine does not imply supernovas are easy to identify. Currently, robotic telescopes scan the night sky, capturing repeated images of the identical patch of space, hoping to search out a changing — or transient — object that wasn’t in previous images.
“Automated software presents a listing of candidate explosions to humans, who spend time verifying the candidates and executing spectroscopic observations,” Miller said. “We will only definitively know that a candidate is actually a supernova by collecting its spectrum — the source’s dispersed light, which reveals elements present within the explosion. There are existing robotic telescopes that may collect spectra, but this can be often done by humans operating telescopes with spectrographs.”
To potentially remove humanity’s role in these proceedings, Miller and his team developed BTSbot and trained the AI with over 1.4 million historical images from nearly 16,000 sources. These included confirmed supernovas and other explosive astronomical phenomena just like the temporary flaring of stars, stars which can be periodically variable stars and the flaring of galaxies.
Putting BTSbot to the test
With the intention to test their recent AI tool, the researchers set about trying to find a newly spotted supernova candidate designated SN2023tyk, which is believed to be a Type Ia supernova positioned around 760 million light-years from Earth.
The supernova was found by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) robotic telescope on Oct. 3. Because it searched ZTF data, BTSbot was in a position to discover SN2023tyk on Oct. 5, after which it collected the potential supernova’s spectrum from the robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory, often known as the SED machine (SEDM). Thus, through this automatic collaboration, SN2023tyk was classified as a Type Ia supernova. BSTbot didn’t even need its human operators to get the word out, as this information was routinely shared with astronomers by the AI on Oct. 7.
“The simulated performance was excellent, but you never really understand how that translates to the true world until you truly try it,” Northwestern graduate student Nabeel Rehemtulla, who co-led the BTSbot technology development with Miller, said in the identical statement.
“Once the observations from SEDM and the automated classification got here in,” Rehemtulla added, “we felt an enormous wave of relief. The great thing about it’s that after every thing is turned on and dealing properly, we do not actually do anything. We fall asleep at night, and, within the morning, we see that BTSbot and these other AIs unwaveringly do their jobs.”