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Milky Way Hubble

At that place are a bang-up many mysteries still to unravel in the creation, and we may be one pace closer to solving one of them thanks to machine learning. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley SETI Research Center have turned an AI loose on fast radio burst (FRB) data from 2022. These momentary flashes tin can outshine millions of stars, just we don't know what causes them. The new AI-powered analysis detected more than iii times as many FRBs than previous scans showed.

As impressive as this feat may exist, nosotros still don't know what causes the flashes from FRB 121102 (or any FRB source for that matter). Some researchers remember they have something to do with supernovas or pulsars (rotating neutron stars), merely at that place's also a possibility FRBs could have some connectedness to extraterrestrial intelligence. That's why SETI is interested in the phenomenon.

The data in question comes from the Dark-green Bank Telescope in Westward Virginia, which scanned an object known as FRB 121102 in August 2022. FRB 121102, which resides in a dwarf galaxy some 3 billion light years away,  is a hot topic in astronomy circles because it'southward the only known source of repeating fast radio bursts. All the other FRBs detected since their discovery in 2007 accept been one-off events. Previous assay of the data from that mean solar day in 2022 showed 21 FRBs coming from FRB 121102, but that may be only a fraction of what's really there.

The SETI researchers led past doctoral pupil Gerry Zhang trained a convolutional neural network to detect fast radio bursts in data sets collected by telescopes. The team calls this the "Breakthrough Listen" project. The technique is not much different at a technical level than using a neural network to identify objects in a photograph. Later on education the network what FRBs look similar with labeled data, it tin can then make accurate assessments with fresh information.

The merely repeating FRB ever discovered, located in a dwarf milky way iii billion low-cal years away.

Breakthrough Heed combed through the 400 terabytes of data from the Dark-green Bank Telescope, which independent 21 known FRBs. The AI pointed to 72 additional flashes, bringing the total to 93 fast radio bursts from FRB 121102 on that single solar day.

Having a better accounting of FRB activity will aid astronomers develop models to explain the signals. Using technologies like Breakthrough Mind, we may even notice that other FRBs echo in ways we didn't notice previously.

Top image credit: NASA/Hubble

Now read: Scientists Discover Brightest Ever Fast Radio Burst, Mysterious fast radio bursts might come from conflicting solar sail spacecraft, and Despite early reports, SETI doesn't retrieve we've but found alien life