AI Spots First Supernova Without Human Help
For the first time, artificial intelligence has fully automated the process of discovering a supernova, from searching for it to confirming it to announcing the findings. An international team of scientists led by Northwestern University has developed a new AI tool called Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot), which uses machine learning to identify supernovae in data from robotic telescopes.
BTSbot was trained on over 1.4 million images from nearly 16,000 sources, including past evidence of supernovae, glaring galaxies, and temporarily flaring stars. Once it is trained, BTSbot can automatically search through new data from robotic telescopes and identify potential supernova candidates. It then requests follow-up observations from other telescopes to confirm the discovery.
In a recent test, BTSbot successfully detected and confirmed a new supernova, named SN2023tyk, in data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic camera in California that scans the northern sky every two days. BTSbot also classified the supernova as a Type Ia supernova, which is a type of supernova that is used to measure the expansion of the universe.
The discovery of SN2023tyk by BTSbot is a significant milestone in the development of AI for astronomy. It shows that AI can be used to automate the entire process of supernova discovery, which could lead to the discovery of many more supernovae in the future.
"This significantly streamlines large studies of supernovae," said Nabeel Rehemtulla, an astronomer at Northwestern University who co-led the development of BTSbot. "It will help us better understand the life cycles of stars and the origin of elements supernovae create, like carbon, iron, and gold."
BTSbot is still under development, but the researchers hope to release it to the public so that other astronomers can use it to discover their own supernovae. They also plan to train BTSbot to identify other types of astronomical objects, such as black holes and neutron stars.
The discovery of SN2023tyk by BTSbot is a reminder of the power of AI to revolutionize astronomy. AI can help astronomers to discover new objects, to study them in more detail, and to make new discoveries about the universe.