Using AI to Find a Cosmic Looking Glass
The automation of astronomy has only just begun—and there's no telling where it will end.
Imagine you’re Edwin Hubble in 1923, about to prove that the Milky Way is just one galaxy in a universe filled with them. You have just spotted a faraway variable star. You write down a note about that star on a photographic plate: “VAR!”
Or imagine it’s 1977, and you’re reading a printout from a radio telescope that listens for aliens, red pen in hand, when you find a long, strange, still-unexplained signal. “Wow!” you write.
Or imagine it’s August 2017, you’re signed on to Slack, and you’ve just seen the smoldering wreckage of a collision of two neutron stars. “!” you type
